BOOKS: PICK OF THE WEEK

Marina Warner gives the opening talk of the Birmingham Readers and Writers Festival on Friday, based on her new book No Go the Bogeyman. Full of baby-snatching ogres and scuttling squid-headed aliens, her book examines the different ways we use to scare children to death.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go. When Warner first read the demonic children's tales of Dr Hoffman, she now admits, she was so terrified a shear-fingered tailor was going to chop her thumbs off she ran wimpering to the garden and begged her father to sling the book on the bonfire. Probably as an attempt to exorcise Struwwelpeter's blood-hungry spectre, Warner has gone on to trawl the world for hundreds of other menacing examples of bogeymen and bugaboos.

Meet Lycaon, who baked his victims into pies and was turned into a werewolf, discover the darker cultural history of bananas, and wonder at the psychiatrists' bills in the Catalan town of Berga. To this day, it seems, the mothers of Berga celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi by laying out their new- born babies in the town square so that the infants can be jumped over by a man dressed as Satan.

Poets Linton Kwesi Johnson (above) and Brian Patten, meanwhile, are finishing up their "Double Vision" tour. It would be worth listening to Johnson for the resonance of his voice alone, but add impeccable dapper dressing and fine-tuned rhythmic delivery, then savour subtle rhyme-laden poems with corrosive political intuition and a sexy disposition. Offset the reggae master with heartfelt meditations from Mersey poet Patten.

Patten's Liverpool stablemate, Roger McGough, cracks open the 1998 Poetry International Festival with a punning menagerie of animal poems for kids, choreographed with one-occasion-only participatory props to help you make duffle-goats, brush-babies and tea-pets.

Brian Patten and Linton Kwesi Johnson: Bowen West Theatre, Bedford (01234 219333) 24 Oct; Civic/Book Festival, Guildford (01483 444555) 28 Oct; Theatr Hafren, Newtown (01686 625007) 29 Oct; Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon (01874 611622) 30 Oct; Frome (01373 465949) 31 Oct; Birmingham Rep (0121- 236 4455) 1 Nov

Birmingham Readers and Writers Festival (0121-440 3838): Marina Warner, 30 Oct, 8pm. Festival to 8 Nov

Poetry International, Purcell Room, South Bank, London SE1 (0171-960 4242): McGough's Menagerie, 30 Oct, 12 noon and 2pm; Czeslaw Milosz, 30 Oct, 7.30pm. Festival to 7 Nov