Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Children Innocent

This year's Reith lecturer is the Booker prize-nominated author Marina Warner. A writer of fiction, criticism and history, her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairytales. Her series of Reith Lectures, entitled 'Managing Monsters', explores how myths express and shape our attitudes.

In her third lecture, Marina Warner examines the burden of dreams that children bear from Peter Pan to Poltergeist. The yearning desire to work back to a pristine state of goodness, an Eden of lost innocence, has focused on children. But Marina Warner argues that appalling social problems can arise from the concept that childhood and adult life are separate, when they are in fact, inextricably intertwined.