Book Reviews

In the spring of 1943, Allied armies in North Africa prepared to attack the Axis powers on the continent of Europe. Dominating the central Mediterranean, Sicily was the obvious first target, and it was clear the German High Command would heavily reinforce the island. To counter this, British naval intelligence concocted a bold disinformation operation aimed at fooling the Germans into thinking the Allies’ real targets were Greece and Sardinia. Taking advantage of the well-known links between Franco’s government in Spain and Nazi Germany, the Navy dressed a cadaver in the uniform of a Royal Marine officer and set it afloat near Huelva, its hands clutching a briefcase containing General

David Lang first heard about the Himalayas when he was a little boy. As his father read aloud from the works of the great botanical explorers — Reginald Farrer, Frank Kingdon-Ward, and ‘Chinese’ Wilson — he imagined the high mountains and the flower-filled valleys. Above all, he longed to see the yaks: ‘there was something about yaks which appealed to a small child’. When he grew up, David Lang became a vet with a busy practice in Sussex. He is also an accomplished field naturalist, equally knowledgeable about plants and birds, and author of several books about British wild flowers. Not until 1983 did he realise his dream of visiting

Anyone who has ever had a duff interview will feel for James Kennaway, the screenwriter who met with Hitchcock in 1962 to discuss the possibility of his scripting the director’s next venture about a flock of birds attacking a Bodega Bay community. ‘I see this film done only one way,’ declared the cocksure scribe: ‘You should never see a bird’. Poor Kennaway, with his subtle Greek notions of drama in absentia. He should have realised that Hitchcock held affinities with the science fiction directors of the late Fifties, who made films with titles like The Blob, which, lo and behold, featured a giant jelly on the rampage. The Birds would

This pleasant book, easy on the eye and (as importantly with art books) the thigh, has a pretty picture containing a dog or cat on virtually every page, so the fact that its extended essay of a text is disappointing hardly matters. To give Professor Rubin his due he tries to descend from his academic rostrum and treat the subject as a pet-lover as much as an art historian. That the book is dedicated to a couple of cats, Coco and Girlfriend, carries coochy-coo too far; but it is refreshing these deconstructive days to hear he ‘adores Impressionist paintings and quotidian quadrupeds’ — even if one could do without the