Gyles Brandreth is torn between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan in a gallery full of the authors who shaped the imagination of the author and former Tory MP.

"Winnie the Pooh is with me in my heart every day, but I have the soul of Peter Pan, alas increasingly disguised in the body of Captain Hook."

Many of the images in the exhibition he has curated at the National Portrait Gallery in London are deceptively idyllic.

AA Milne was photographed in 1926 with his son and teddy bear leaning against him. The son, the original Christopher Robin, said bitterly years later that his father built his fame "standing on the shoulders of a small boy".

Children from all over the world wrote to Enid Blyton at "Green Hedges, England".

The photograph was part of the propaganda of the most successful children's author until JK Rowling conjured up Harry Potter. The writer, who by the 1950s was earning a stupendous £100,000 from 50 titles a year, is seen with her daughter Imogen and black labrador at her feet. Such moments of intimate domesticity were rare, her children recalled later. Enid Blyton was a seriously busy woman: the exhibition includes her battered Imperial portable typewriter, on which she regularly hammered out 10,000 words a day.

"If you want turmoil, angst and horrible tribulation, just dig into the home life of a children's author," Mr Brandreth said.

Dick King-Smith, a struggling author and farmer for many years before his book became the hit film Babe, was photographed sitting on a large sleepy pig.

Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, was painted by Edward Seago in 1942 with pipe in mouth and fishing rod in hand.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, champion of the frail and weak in The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy - which made her enough money to leave America and buy a house and estate in Kent - stands revealed as a high Victorian ogre, terrifyingly upholstered in acres of embroidered satin.

The exhibition, which is free, runs until the end of August.