Wherever in the world today children play with toys, the odds are that their playthings will have been made in the Far East and carry the imprint of a major American Corporation like Mattel or Hasbro. It was not always so: for much of the twentieth century, it was the British firm of Lines Brothers which claimed to be the Earth's largest toy manufacturer, growing so rapidly after its foundation in the 1920s that it became the world's first multi-national toy enterprise. Aided by ownership of the internationally-renowned toy shop, Hamleys of London, manufacturing plants in Europe and the major...