In spite of having been bitten by parrots from three continents, I'm still fascinated by them. Parrots tend to possess their owners, not the other way round; and the possessed are prone to prattle like parrots when they write about them. So it's good to see that an intelligent book about these fabulous but capricious creatures has arrived. Now we can all appreciate them from a safe distance.

Parrot Culture is a thoughtful literary portmanteau - not one weighed down with an ornithologist's sentimental stories, or spurious claims to the birds' vast intelligence. It stands apart from websites where anthropomorphism rules and there are gushing accounts of parrot spirituality. As Bruce Thomas Boehrer shows, Flaubert ridiculed that a