Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved unreservedly by her children and comes across in My Family as a kindly eccentric. In truth, she hovered over them for much of their lives, adored but not properly understood, mainly because she was a lifelong alcoholic.

Obsessed with animals, Durrell became in middle age someone who loathed his own species

After Corfu, Gerald began keeping stray animals in the family house and garden in Bournemouth. He worked for a while at Whipsnade Zoo and at the end of the 1940s, making use of a generous legacy from his father, started bringing creatures in danger of extinction to England, initially from Africa. After failing to gain permission from various councils in southern England to found a zoo, he leased Les Augrès Manor and its grounds on Jersey, which endures as a monument to his ideals. For one thing, he revolutionised the notion of the zoo, transforming it from a source of prurient entertainment to a means of preserving threatened species.

Myself and Other Animals comes out under Gerald’s name but is edited by his widow Lee, his second wife; and while it is presented as his unpublished autobiography, albeit mainly by implication, it is anything but.