Katherine Rundell’s animal magic
Pigs, we discover, can differentiate between Bach and a brass band and play video games with their snouts.
Skokie Public Library / flickr | Creative Commons
Arresting facts narrated in style
An eighty-something Anthony Powell once recorded meeting a woman with a little-girl-lost voice described as belonging to the world of Powell’s Bright Young People-era youth, “not of today”. I feel the same way about the Oxford don Katherine Rundell, whose locution – genteel, elegant, precise, sibilant even – makes her sound as you’d imagine an immensely high-powered Victorian governess (Miss Prism, perhaps, in The Importance of Being Earnest) might have sounded.
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