Talking of books
Here, Pluto!
Benny Green
It is a revealing comment on the mess into which the human race has worked itself that whereas the definitive fictional archetype of the nineteenth century was Sherlock Holmes, to the glorification of the powers of ratiocination, the definitive one of the twentieth should be Mickey Mouse, leader of the current head-long flight back into childhood. It is surely no coincidence that as the world gets smaller, the mass of adult Mickey-followers bulks larger, surely not just an accident that the superstitious, who used in a crisis to invoke one deity or another, rely these days on the talismanic device of Mickey stickers on their motor cars and Mickey effigies on their shirt-fronts. Perhaps it is a further symptom of the retreat from maturity that I, in attempting to say something about The Art of Disney (New English Library £13), should feel the need to reject so much of the latterday
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