“O

H no, not again,” my mother would say every time I brought Watership Down home from the children’s library. It’s not that she objected to my reading it over and over again; it was the inconsolable flood of tears that came with it. No matter how far in advance you know that bad things are going to happen to good rabbits, it still hurts.

The news that writer Richard Adams had died on Christmas Eve at the age of 96 vividly recalled to me that fat hardcover volume which stood sentinel in the lefthand corner of the top shelf in the children’s fiction section (the shorter among us had to stand on tiptoe to wedge it out and lug it over to the desk).

Described by some as an adult book for children and by others as