SIMON BARNES

As Kingfishers Catch Fire Alex Preston Corsair €35 ★★★★★

There’s the old story about the old lady who saw Hamlet and didn’t like it: ‘Too many quotations.’

She wouldn’t get on with this book, then. Quotations run wild through the thickets of Alex Preston’s prose as he leaps from one great writer to the next, listening to all they have to say about his favourite birds.

At one point we even get an extended quote from Preston’s own novel, In Love And War.

Among all this rich stuff – the title is from Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it would still be a great poem if he had only given us those four words – you can find old friends, thrilling new possibilities and the occasional unworthy thought that the author might be showing off just a tiny bit.

The quote-by-quote stuff reads a trifle jerkily, but there’s enough great stuff to keep you going.

It’s all mixed up with little chunks of autobiography. What an upbringing! There’s his illustrious ancestors, including Sir Edward Grey, former foreign secretary. Then he’s 18 and living in ‘a grand Quai d’Orsay apartment block’. Now he’s ‘in the canopied bed in which my father-in-law died’ listening to peacocks. Now he’s leaving his own lavish winter wedding by ‘fur-piled sleigh’. And you might get the occasional unworthy thought – but you suppress it, don’t you?

There are accounts and quotes covering 21 species of bird, and each one has a full-page colour illustration, jolly nice in a slightly Sixties-album-cover kind of way. Not a lot about conservation. Not a lot about the birds themselves, it’s all about what birds mean to writers.

In between the quotes and the autobiography there are the author’s own thoughts: ‘It may be that the kingfisher… reminds us of our own distance from such grace.’

And then again, it may not.