THE UNEXPECTED TRUTH ABOUT ANIMALS

Doubleday, 392pp, £16,99, Oldie price £12.08 inc p&p Does William Hartston have a crush on Lucy Cooke? You might think so on reading his review of her new book. ‘Beautifully written, meticulously researched, this is a splendid read. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a non-fiction work so much,’ he concluded in the Sunday

Express. He has long admired her for her work on sloths, but now she has shown that her ‘enthusiasm and expertise extend far beyond the world of that finest of creatures’, with ‘chapters on eels, beavers, hyenas, vultures, bats, frogs, storks, hippos, moose, pandas, penguins and chimpanzees’. With all of these, he went on, she seems to have had personal experiences, one involving a beaver’s testicles and another a bat’s penis.

The Unexpected Truth ‘is a riot of facts’, agreed James Marriott in the

Times, singling out for praise her ‘restless demystifying’ of the depiction by evangelical audiences of penguins as ‘noble, loving creatures and admirable models for human conduct’. Penguins, it turns out, practise ‘masturbation, necrophilia, child abuse and gang rape’ and are one of the few species to exchange goods for sex. Marriott was delighted to discover that the ‘hyena is the only mammal without a vagina’ and that ‘vultures defecate on their feet to sanitise them’. ‘We have an almost endless appetite for this stuff’, he wrote; ‘really, Cooke has presented herself with a series of open goals’ – which she scores with ‘style and panache’.