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”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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

The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.