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“... In his parks in 16th-century India, Akbar the Great employed personal doctors to look after his tigers, cheetahs, deer and five thousand elephants, and invited the populace at large to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I saw for myself last year in Yunnan), in China and many emerging economies such horrors are still standard ...”

“... are often first seen as minuscule figures set against a vast backdrop of space and time. Colin Tudge follows this line in The Day before Yesterday, but his message, unlike Hardy’s, is that there is no destiny: humanity was not fated to happen as an inevitable link in the chain between apes and angels. Evolution is often seen as progression ...”

“... as is the Cerrado of Brazil or the eucalyptus forests in Australia; and the central theme of Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees is variety and the evolution of variety: variety in form, in adaptation, in kinds of dependence – most trees need to cohabit with soil fungi, some need insects, birds or fruit bats to pollinate them and spread their ...”