Tom Fort

Amphibidextrous

Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians

By

Chatto & Windus 290pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

There was a time when boys had hobbies. They collected stamps, pinned dead butterflies to strips of balsa wood, stole eggs from birds’ nests, painted model aircraft and toy soldiers, and spotted trains. The point about hobbies – whether indoor or outdoor – was that they had to be slightly obsessive. To have a hobby was to belong to a club of other obsessives, with rules and rituals and due process.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    Follow Us