Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 bestseller The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse offered such outrageously marketable truisms – the kind of comforting and occasionally cloying little captions and cute drawings about vulnerability and kindness that parents often like to stick above toddlers’ beds – that readers might have viewed it with more cynicism had it not had such a sweet and evidently genuine back story.

Mackesy was an unlikely Instagram star. The writer and illustrator had a bucolic childhood in the Northumberland countryside, among horses, dogs, chickens and pigs. “I didn’t quite understand people,” the endearingly scruffy Mackesy would later tell Country Living , a magazine he describes as being a staple growing up. As an adult, he had a successful but low-key career for many ye

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