Nature is red in tooth and claw. Get over it

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is.

The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called Rufus.

Rufus is simultaneously the book’s hero and villain. Because it’s written mostly from the fox’s perspective you root for him all the way — even in the dismal scene when (based on a true story, this) he manages to drown five couple of foxhounds by luring them onto the thin ice on Fawsley lake.