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How to live in a world without light: Life in the Dark at the Natural History Museum reviewed
Like most of our ape ancestors, we have really had only one response to the fall of night. We have…
The selective breeding of pets: how far should we go?
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s…
The lovely curlew is wading into extinction
Mary Colwell, a producer at the BBC natural history unit, is on a mission: to save the British curlew from…
The sacred chickens that ruled the roost in ancient Rome
Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
Animals make us human
There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen…
Kathmandu — or don’t
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Tracking the great Siberian tiger
Of all charismatic animals, tigers are surely the most filmed, televised, documented, noisily cherished and, paradoxically, the most persecuted on…
Green is the colour of happiness
According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it…
We all love butterflies — so why are we wiping them out?
Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus…
New ways to destroy the world
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost…
Why the cheating cuckoo may finally be getting its comeuppance
In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with…
John Lister-Kaye tracks Highland wildlife through a pair of binoculars as he lies in his bath
Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a…
From water-dwelling sponges to face-eating hyenas: the whole of life is in this book
‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose…
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