Bitten by the bug

‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at night, which may be why, like the author of this book, I never thought bedbugs were real. ‘Bedbugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing,’ Brooke Borel told her father (a pathologist who specialises in skin conditions). But as Mr Borel told his disbelieving daughter, bedbugs are real all right. They even have a fancy Latin name: Cimex lectularius. So, having been bitten to buggery (moral: never share a flat with someone who bought a used futon off the internet) Brooke Borel did what virtually every journalist ends up doing, eventually, and wrote a book about her misfortunes.

The result is a diverting study of a creature that’s been around a lot longer than we have, and will probably still be around long after we’ve all snuffed it. Bedbugs were biting humans long before humans invented beds, but when we invented modern pesticides, it looked like we had the blighters beat.