Book of the week: The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shawcross

“The facts and folklore of birdlife, and man’s equivocal relationship with birds, are dissected in admirable detail in this handsome new book by Roy and Lesley Adkins,” said Roland White in The Sunday Times.

While their beauty has consistently awed us, we’ve also tended to see birds as omens of ill fortune – and “subjected them to terrible cruelty”. Until it was banned in the mid 19th century, cockfighting was England’s “most popular national sport”. Before that other, even worse games were played – such as “Throwing at Cocks” (where birds were “pelted with sticks until dead”) and “Mumbling a Sparrow” (which involved biting the head off a live sparrow).

The book makes clear how spectacularly abundant birds once were, said Christopher Hart in the Daily Mail. “Within living memory, London was filled with tens of thousands of sparrows and starlings” – whereas today there are just a few “feral pigeons”.

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Sad though this is, the Adkins claim there are grounds for optimism too: “an awareness of the natural world is growing rapidly”, they write. All in all, this is a “marvellously original slice of social history”.

Little, Brown 496pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

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