'A renegade who was right . . . He was truly a man before his time' SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
'An account of Durrell's very first job as an animal handler at Whipsnade just after the end
of the Second World War an experience that helped fashion his philosophy of animal keeping'
GUARDIAN At the age of two I made up my mind quite firmly and unequivocally that the only
thing I wanted to do was to study animals. Nothing else interested me. Republished to
celebrate the centenary of his birth here is Gerald Durrell's legendary account of his
coming-of-age as a reader writer and budding naturalist at Whipsnade Zoo. He joyfully
recaptures the glory of this single formative year where in the crucible of muck operatic
brown bears and reading Pliny by night and tending to the lions by day the passionate
worldview of one of the century's great animal-loving renegades came into full view. 'One of
the finest and most lyrical nature writers in English' OBSERVER
