News Category: News

Why Cavafy Matters

I first came across Cavafy in his own city of Alexandria. I had stumbled in after a long desert trip. I was in a bad way. I’d almost lost my mind, and hoped to find it there. Instead I found …

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Cry of the Wild

Cry of the Wild is now out. It’s my attempt to show what it feels like for eight species – orca, fox, otter, rabbit, gannet, eel, mayfly and human (yes, human) to live alongside us. Writing it has been a thrilling …

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Being a Human

Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 years of consciousness is now out, published by Profile in the UK and Metropolitan in the US. It tries to answer the question ‘What sort of creature is a human?’, and it took me …

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The Screaming Sky


The Screaming Sky, my account of my long-standing obsession with swifts, has been published by the splendid Little Toller. It’s magnificently illustrated by Jonathan Pomroy, who understands better than anyone on the planet how swifts move.…

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Why Father Brown is better than Sherlock Holmes

[First published on the University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog]

Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has issued proceedings, complaining that Enola Holmes, a recently released film about Sherlock Holmes’ sister, portrays the great detective as too emotional.

Sherlock Holmes was famously …

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