Authors Electric

The Man Who Listens To Horses by Monty Roberts The Man Who Listens To Horses is part autobiography, part equine training manual. It details Monty Roberts' upbringing in the tough world of cowboys and rodeo competition. From a very young age, the boy Monty was entering rodeos and winning prizes on horses his father had 'broken' (i.e. trained using the traditional and rather brutal cowboy method of the time). These days, we tend to talk more of 'backing' or 'starting' a young horse under saddle, which involves winning the horse's trust rather than using force and fear to produce results. As he grew up watching his father and the other cowboys work, Monty began to suspect that young horses could be trained more quickly and better by speaking their language... the non-verbal language of Equus. To develop his new technique, he followed and observed groups of mustangs in the wild, noting how the herd was always led by a mare who was responsible for disciplini...

When we look back on the second decade of the twenty first century, what will stand out? Unrest in Eastern Europe and the looming shadow of Russian expansionism, lockdown and Covid-19, America being run by an orange-tinged millionaire with a shaky grasp on reality, the fallout from Brexit, Partygate and our third woman prime minister in thirty five years? Undoubtedly, all of these things will feature in the history books and be woven into the stories our children tell their children. But it’s not war, or conflict, or pandemics or politics that I want to focus on today.   All over the world, the front pages and the airwaves are full of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the world’s second longest-reigning monarch (Louis XIV just pipped her to the post). And so they should be. She was a remarkable woman and it’s not just in Britain and the Commonwealth that we’re wondering what on earth life will look like without her. I was born in 1966, fourteen years into her reign. I came to co...