Oliver Conway

We need something to test the truth against.

Lyra, with her demon Pan, a kind of companion spirit in animal form, first appeared 30 years ago.

Travelling across worlds in Northern Lights.

She's always curious and inquisitive.

I think it's a very important quality.

We should encourage it in children.

It was the start of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which the BBC dramatised for TV.

Now, after 3,000 pages of her adventures and 49 million copies sold globally, his latest work, The Rose Field, completes Pullman's second Lyra trilogy, in which the shadowy magisterium is waging war on imagination.

Who and what do you see in real life as the enemies of imagination?

The education policy of the government, which insists on learning things off by heart and sitting in rows and walking silently down corridors.

Ease imagination more than make-believe.

We know that children have it and we often lose it as adults.

A lot of people think that it's just the power of making things up.

I think imagination is a form of perception.

What I call the Rose Field is a sort of field in which things exist that you can only see with your imagination.

They're there, but you can't see them if you don't imagine them.

Such as love, such as fear.

Yes, scooping up everything that exists and then passing it off as something else, or rather just using it, just mashing it all down into a sort of manure that can fertilise the roots of whatever money-making scheme is hatching itself in your head.

That's immoral, but unfortunately it's not illegal.

And when I asked him about the different ways that children and adults read his stories, he dropped a little hint.