Jonathan Mirsky

Flesh & Fur

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs

By

William Collins 273pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

This is the only book I have read, and in eighty-one years I have read thousands, that has made me happy. Many others have interested, fascinated, taught, amazed or moved me, but only The Great Grisby made me not just contented or pleased, but actually happy. Mikita Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the “real world” out there, towards which I’m increasingly ambivalent’. These words alone could have done it.

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