While composing what would become his most enduring and popular book, Charlotte's Web, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: 'Write what you know.' Helpless pigs, silly geese,clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favourite hours as child and adult. Painfully shy, White once wrote of himself 'this boy felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people'. Nonetheless, that tens of millions have been so moved by Char ...