Authors Electric

The real thing My illustration of a lion It all started with a book I was given as a child, Animal Life of the World . It was published in 1934, and reflects the values and attitudes of the time. The photographs were all in black and white, and the chapter titles were quaintly imaginative. Little Bandits of our Hills and Hedgerows , Leather-sided Giants , Animals Verging on Extinction (the Thylacine was still going at this point), and The Big Cats . I must have been given this book before I could read, because initially I just looked at the pictures. The chapter entitled Big Game of Other Days (note the word game!) fascinated me, with its photographs of model iguanodons and megalosauruses in realistic swampy settings. I couldn’t tell the difference between them and a photograph of a live animal, and I assumed that dinosaurs were alive and well and living in a remote part of Africa, as I’d never seen them at the zoo. The...

Tigers have played a big part in literature, from the factual in Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon to the literary in The Life of Pi , And then there’s the children’s market – Tigger, in Winnie the Pooh and Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes . Tigers seem to be able to represent just about anything, from the Nazis in The Tiger who Came to Tea , to the dishonourable side of man – Shere Khan in The Jungle Books . And in some way they all retain their basic nature; Tigger exhibits tigerishness, but it is muted to the less threatening play of a kitten: Tigger said: “Excuse me, but there’s something climbing up your table,” and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully: “Have I won?”          ...