George Walden

A Dog’s Life

The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

By

Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 221pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Humanity has always had an indifferent press, particularly outside Britain. The only people who believe in progress, Baudelaire wrote, are fools and Belgians. For the Romanian Emil Cioran, ‘existence is our exile and nothingness our home’, while generations of Russians have displayed a degree of misanthropy understandable to anyone who has lived in their country. 

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