Philip Hoare

Wild Things

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary

By

Granta Books 427pp £25 order from our bookshop

What distinguishes us from animals? Why did I scoop up a squashed hedgehog from the road this morning, on my dawn bike ride to the beach? The line between human and animal has never been clear, least of all in the medieval bestiaries that inspired Caspar Henderson’s magnificent new compendium. In those, men might have faces in their chests, or the heads of stags; virgins might be courted by unicorns; aristocrats claimed descent from bears. But Darwin didn’t make things any better. He not only proposed that we were once apes, but also that the whole of creation was and always will be in flux. Yet even Darwin was confounded by a peacock. What place was there in his system for such useless beauty?

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

    • '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… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us