Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley, Atlantic Books, £14.99, ISBN 184354010X Reviewed by Roy Herbert
IT IS easy to feel affection for Clara. She was a celebrity, fond of the smells of tobacco and oranges, and drank beer. She was 6 feet in height, 12 feet round the middle and she weighed 3 tons. She was an Indian rhinoceros, a one-horn species.
An enterprising Dutchman, Douwe Mout van der Meer, found her as a baby in Assam, where she had become accustomed to human company, and shipped her back to Europe in 1741 with a plan to put her on…
