Philip Pullman is one of the most commercially and critically successful British authors of the past decade. With a writing career extending back to the early 1970s, Pullman's great achievement has been in the publication of the His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights (1995; US title The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). With these novels, which have appealed equally to children and to adults, Pullman has...