Category: Book review

  This book persuaded me to be interested in something in which I didn’t think I wanted to be interested.  That’s an achievement for any author – to engage the initially uninterested. And Jeff Ollerton does it through a mixture of his own enthusiasm, very clear explanation of some fairly complex (but beautifully complex) biology…

This is a lovely book, filled with an appealing mixture of wisdom, humour, nostalgia, stories, facts, speculation and common sense. It’s about birdwatching, very much birdwatching, and not just birding, for Rob Hume has watched many birds and thought about what he was seeing and, it seems, enjoyed most of it immensely. In a mixture…

I’m not a great fan of economics because it always seems to explain things in retrospect rather than predict them in prospect but you can write that off as hauteur from one trained as a scientist if you like. But I always like Dieter Helm’s books and in 2019 I chose his Green and Prosperous…

  This is a fine book about a very interesting species. I’ve seen Wild Boar in continental Europe (Netherlands, France and Spain) but not yet in the UK. Decades ago, in the Camargue, I sometimes travelled the roads after dark in a flimsy ancient Citroen Deux-Chevaux and I always thought that any close encounters of…

  The British Isles provide nest sites for internationally important proportions of the North Atlantic biogeographical area seabird populations and, for several species, high proportions of global populations. If you want to see large numbers of nesting Manx Shearwaters, Great Skuas and Gannets then this is the place to come. And so it is concerning…