At 672 pages, Walter Jackson Bate’s “wonderfully moving and informative” Samuel Johnson (Chatto, 1978) is the weightiest book in philosopher Simon Blackburn’s pot-pourri of recent reads.
As someone who has “often wondered how on earth they manage to film the things they do,” he thoroughly enjoyed James Gray’s Snarl for the Camera: Memoirs of a wildlife cameraman (Piatkus Books, 2002).
And Blackburn is very amused by Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson (Chatto, 2002), which “apart from making me glad that I am not a golden potto*…is a useful warning against some kinds of…
