Pigeon Racing: A Miner’s World?
Men who spent their working lives underground found a new world of freedom in racing birds.
Natural History
Tutankhamun’s Ostriches
Ungainly but fleet of foot, the flightless bird offers insights into the life of a legendary pharaoh.
How did the Elephant get its Trunk?
It took millennia to find out.
Interspecies Violence
Chronicling an abusive relationship between people and the animals we have hunted, imprisoned and eaten.
The Great Migration Mystery
It was once believed that swallows spent their winters on the Moon, or asleep on river beds.
Park Life
Britain’s National Parks are a forgotten legacy of postwar reconstruction.
The World of Medieval Dogdom
The people of medieval Europe were devoted to their dogs; one great French dog-lover declared that the greatest defect of the species was that they ‘lived not long enough’.
The Natural History: Gilbert White's Selborne
Despite his influence on the likes of Charles Darwin, the 18th-century ‘parson-naturalist’ is sorely underrated.
Tiger Tiger
No other creature has embodied so many attributes: magic spirit, vermin, guardian of holy men, symbol of mother India, an incarnation of evil yet also its vanquisher.
Green and Pleasant Land
Four centuries of horticultural endeavours in the modest plots of the ‘lower orders’.