Book of the Month October 2021 - The Nervous Knight

The Nervous Knight: A Story About Overcoming Worries and Anxiety by Anthony Lloyd Jones

This book is about a knight who is rarely seen without their shiny armour. A protection from anything bad that might happen: a fall, being taken away by a dragon, spilled ice cream (sound familiar?).




​It is a story of building friendships and overcoming anxieties through connecting with others. It is also a story which has inclusivity at its heart. The knight’s pronoun is ‘they’, and a whole spectrum of human beings is included in the book.  

This is a book that will allow parents, carers and trusted adults and their little ones to relate to the knight in their struggle to deal with anxiety, and how it can manifest in various physical ways.

The knight, alongside their knight friends, navigates through not being able to control ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING and that not knowing what’s going to happen next does not mean the worst thing will indeed happen.

It’s a story of friendship where the knight learns to trust others, and the book gives the reader strategies and ideas they can take forward in real life.
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A brilliant book, with plenty of opportunities to lead discussions and questions for your own little ones and with resources at the end of the book to support further learning and reflection. 

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The Devil You know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion by Dr Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne 

I have a passionate aversion to violence and cruelty.  Before holding Adshead’s book in my hand I would look away, change the channel, on anything related to cruelty – be it news, educational or (so called) entertainment.

So, it more than raised eyebrows at home that I was embarking on this book.  But why?
I had come to know of Gwen Adshead’s through her passion for attachment and her belief that ‘no psychiatrist should be without a working knowledge of attachment theory’*.  I instinctively felt curious.  But the word ‘compassion’ in the title was the deal breaker – a sense I could be safe to explore what I fear.

Gwen Adshead is a Forensic Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist.  The book is built on the case studies of 11 of her patients from across Broadmoor, the prison system, and the community.  In it Adshead is as much someone who walks alongside her patients as they tell and make sense of their story, as she is their therapist.  It is readable – in a language sense, with the input of co-author Eileen Horne.

For Adshead, the study of attachments in relationships has been a major influence on her thinking about human behaviour, and in this book the thread of childhood attachments in relationships and their association with later violence weaves through some of the cases.

The book seeks that we open a window on compassion and close the one on condemnation.  Adshead is very conscious not to fall foul of being accused of being soft on perpetrators.  To think so is to miss the point.  She advocates that as a society we can and should learn from their stories, to promote measures that encourage pro-social attitudes and reduce childhood adversity and making a powerful case for mental health services well before the point of crisis. 

The book was worth the emotional investment. Not one to be galloped through but contemplated with compassion, on how such behaviours make us feel about the perpetrators, and what it is for us all to be human.

Maggie McManus
Development Manager, Scottish Attachment in Action
(All views my own)

*https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/security-of-mind-20-years-of-attachment-theory-and-its-relevance-to-psychiatry/F730F989CACEF1AB43581D309616547A