In (vain) search of the snow leopard
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him…
![Let there be light: the Atlantic footballfish dwells 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. [Paulo Oliveira / Alamy Stock Photo]](https://spectator-australia-preprod.go-vip.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/18augartslead.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
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…
Gods and monsters
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Tracking the super cats
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…
The soul takes flight
Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus…
To Hell in a handcart — again
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost…
Cheep trickery
In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with…
Feather-footed through the plashy glen
Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a…
The lion lies down with the worm
‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose…
