Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry is, in his own words, ‘an exploration of the ways in which seabirds exert their hold on the human imagination’. It ranges far and wide: across the world’s oceans, through literature, anthropology, social history and folklore, through Nicolson’s own experiences and deep into recent scientific discoveries that have transformed our knowledge of how these still-mysterious birds live when they are not, briefly, visiting our world.

At the centre of it all is Nicolson’s own intense engagement with seabirds, the roots of which lie deep in his childhood experiences of watching the birds on the Shiant Isles, a little cluster of Hebridean islands that his father, Nigel Nicolson, bought in the 1930s. Adam felt and still