Once upon a time there was a writer called Philip who struggled to make a living. He went to the famous University of Oxford to study stories but, like lots of people who went to places like that, he didn't do well in his studies. After he left he started teaching but couldn't stop writing stories. He wrote lots of good ones and got many of them published, but they didn't make him famous  although they weren't bad at all. Then one day he started writing a very long story indeed called His Dark Materials about a young girl in an alternative universe that lots and lots of people liked, unless they were very religious and objected to the way he portrayed God and the people who served him. His story also managed to freak out people like the person who is writing this piece right now, who realised rather late on while reading it to his own young daughter that a crucial part of the story involved Philip's heroine losing her virginity. So he put the last book to one side and changed the subject whenever his daughter mentioned it. Still, anyone who can come up with the idea of Armoured Bears can't be all bad.

Anyway, Philip had obviously learned a lot more about stories than the people who'd taught him at Oxford had given him credit for, because one day he decided to edit a selection of the most famous fairy stories of them all: the ones collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm almost exactly 200 years ago. These stories were very famous and well loved. Sometimes they were so well loved that other people, such as Walt Disney, had retold them in their own way and made them rather more sugary than they were originally.

But what Clever Philip had realised was that these were not the kind of stories that depended on the particular and unique prose style of the person who was telling them, but on the strange and wonderful things that happened in them. For they were the kind of stories told by people all over the world who had never come within a million miles of studying stories at famous universities. They were just stories about life and death and fate that had to be told.

There were lots of stories about poor people's children outwitting the wicked and marrying beautiful princesses, even if the princesses' fathers didn't like poor people marrying their daughters. They were stories in which virtue and courage and honesty were rewarded, the wicked were foiled, and, even if sometimes good people died and couldn't, even with magic, be brought back to life, somehow bad people were brought to justice. Some other clever people were able to categorise these stories into various types, and they were filed under what became known as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index.

So Clever Philip put a whole load of these stories together. What was really clever about the way he did it was that he didn't embellish them or prettify them at all. He retold them in such a way that they were faithful to his original sources, and only tinkered with them so that they would be more fun to read. He wrote a few brief notes at the end of each one saying what they reminded him of and what he thought about other people's interpretation of them, and if he occasionally called some of these interpretations "twaddle", particularly when referring to Professor Jung or his followers, that didn't matter so much because he'd retold them so well. What he did particularly well was rejig the dialogue in the stories in such a way as to make it both timeless and contemporary  and also, very often, funny. Which made the stories all the more believable, however crazy they were.

The only problem with the book in the end was that some people felt he could have retold many more of them, such as "Clever Else", for instance, but Clever Philip and his publishers realised that leaving readers wanting more was also rather clever. And everyone hoped that one day, he'd retell many more.