Authors Electric

I recently attended a conference which was held in a museum of natural history. One of the early speakers introduced what turned out to be an extremely successful ice-breaker. Normally ice-breakers are just there to be endured before the actual business of the meeting or conference starts, and they often involve speaking about your innermost secrets - unless you've had the foresight to invent something interesting to say about yourself - to complete strangers who happen to be sitting next to you. But in this case the ice-breaker took the form of discussion in small informal groupings about whether a sloth or a chameleon would win in a fight. Although I don't think many people in the room had very much knowledge of either animal, it was surprisingly entertaining to talk about this. My own feeling was that a sloth was probably bigger and heavier, and could simply fall out of its tree and squash the chameleon flat without too much effort, but I'm willing to be corrected abou...

  As an only child, who first met other children at Sunday School, kids were more alien to me than the birds in the churchyard or the snails at the bottom of our tiny garden. I lived opposite a mainline railway station in North London, before the Clean Air Act, and smog and crowded tube trains and high rise flats were the things I hated most. I seized on any bit of nature I could – dandelions in the park and pigeons under the railway arches. I would follow the coalman’s horse around the streets just for the chance to give him a bit of apple, and visits to my great-aunt in rural Surrey were heaven with my first introductions to voles and shrews and slow worms. But if I couldn’t get the real thing, I’d read about it instead, and the local library was the answer.             The first book that I couldn’t put down was about an underwater world, and I think it was called Claud the Sea Horse , although a discussion board on Ama...