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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Caspar Henderson, whose new book A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous really is a journey into sound. He tells me why the music of the spheres – at least in this solar system – is a terrible racket, what we can learn from whale earwax, and
One of the most beautiful spots I know in Britain is a steep-sided gorge in Devon where the River Dart carves through the Dartmoor rock on its way to the sea. The trees on either side are small, twisted and covered in ferns, mosses and lichens, so that even on a dull day the colours,
In the Zhuangzi, a collection of tales attributed to the eponymous 4th-century BC Chinese philosopher, a frog that lives in a well boasts about its comfortable way of life to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes its own existence in the vast expanse of the ocean, however, the frog has no idea what
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to a full-grown cow. As she sat cross-legged, strumming away not very well on a guitar, the cow lay down beside her and gently nudged her with its huge head as adoringly as any puppy. The
Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite the ravages inflicted on it by humans, continues to offer solace and hope to many. Such, at least, is a possibility linking these fine but quite different books. Lucy Jones’s starting point in Losing Eden
After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, and camping overnight on top of its cliffs, David Gange awoke to revelation. To the west he could see almost the entire length of the Outer Hebrides. To the
Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a friend in West Hollywood and drove across town to the Los Angeles Zoo to report on a project to save the California condor from extinction. By the 1980s the number of condors had — thanks
