Richard Dawkins’s The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie (Bloomsbury) relates a delightful gallimaufry of stories about the evolution of everything from camouflaged frogs to “weakly electric fish” as though the emeritus zoologist were holding forth from a lightly distressed leather armchair. In mellow mood, Sir Richard revisits his own greatest hits (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype), while toying with curious conjectures, such as the idea that with careful experimentation you could “breed a race of pigeons who enjoy listening to Mozart but dislike Stravinsky”.
Hippos, relates Dawkins, are more closely related to whales than to any other land animals. They also, along with dwarf elephants, used to roam the island of Cyprus, one of many pleasing facts in Alex Christofi’s Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of Cyprus (Bloomsbury). Blending millennia of history with modern-day travelogue, the author covers the island as both the birthplace of Stoicism and a centre of the war trade, from the forging of Alexander the Great’s favourite sword to its present use as a platform for RAF jets. Did Jesus’s friend Lazarus even move to Cyprus after being raised from the dead? We can’t rule it out.
