She has mastered a sprightly, enthused tone for her essays, which come at their subjects from unexpected angles. No Roman naturalist or German scholastic would have dared suggest swifts fly the equivalent of five times round the Earth every year. A joyous catalogue of curiosities that builds into a timely reminder that life on planet is worth our wonder.

The Golden Mole is, instead, a literary wonder – a treasury of astonishing, uplifting facts about the brilliant creatures of this world and their evolution, from hermit crabs to wolves to narwhals. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. The Allied forces flew hydrogen balloons over Axis troops to scatter images of fields lined with German graves.The animal was, he believed, conceptually untidy: ‘If a painter had chosen to set a human head on a horse’s neck [or] if a lovely woman ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish, could you stifle laughter, friends?

Of the 21 species, more than half are currently threatened with extinction due to pollution and loss of habitat: if we lose them, we will have lost the world’s only rainbow mammal, a stupidity so grotesque we could not expect to be forgiven. The male rufous hummingbird has an iridescent orange bib, like a Renaissance ruff rendered in Technicolor; when trying to attract a mate, it fluffs up its neck feathers and soars into the sky, then dives down so fast you can hear the air part around it.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

These qualities were on prominent display in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne , published earlier this year. I think that challenge appealed to me: and the books I read as a child remain some of the most important to me, even now. And the final criterion was just love: creatures I longed to have an excuse to spend a month or so reading books about. Set in 1981, it follows the story of a girl from a neglectful home, who is sent to live with her middle-aged cousin in County Waterford. Despite being a firm fiction fan, Chris Deerin stumbled upon a slim volume of essays in 2022 that he can’t stop thinking about.

She also explains how our way of living has already forced countless species into extinction, and how many more are in a highly precarious situation.

She “did not believe in love at first sight”, she tells us, until she was introduced to a pangolin at a wildlife project in Zimbabwe. I can confirm that corvids bring gifts to their human allies; our neighbour here has for some time fed and studied the local jackdaw tribe. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Philostratus warned his third-century readers that there were unscrupulous men out there who had found in the hare ‘a certain power to produce love and try to secure the objects of their affection by the compulsion of magic art’.As 2022 drew to a close, I noticed that many of the “best of the year” lists repeated one particular author’s name and book. I know – so many of us, children and adults – use it to calm and distract ourselves: which feels a brittle, difficult way to move through the world: Tiktok and Instagram can eat up your hours but they’re not large enough, not clear enough, not bold or generous enough. The lynx, though, is secretive and mysterious enough not to have already exhausted our cultural imaginations, and could fit snugly into one of these short entries. The bone in the mole’s middle ear is so large and hypertrophied that it is immensely sensitive to underground vibrations; waiting under the soil or sand, the golden mole can hear the footsteps up above of birds and lizards; it can distinguish between the footfall of ants and termites. So they burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly shining.