I am angry. And I’m pretty sure I am not alone.

The proximate cause of my anger is the ludicrous non-quarantine quarantine to which my family is currently subjected, after a brief trip to France. It’s not that I object to making a sacrifice for public health. It’s that I’m pretty sure, from the way they’ve gone about things, that the Government has absolutely no interest in whether I break the rules or not. There was no information or signage at the Channel crossing, and at no point has anyone told me what the rules are. I got more information from a twitter quiz in the Telegraph than I did from our government.

In this latest phase of Covid-restrictions, we’ve gone for full-throttle half-arsed-ness. Wear a face mask, but don’t worry, we won’t check and no one will enforce it. Go to school, and if you don’t we’ll fine you, except we probably won’t because headteachers won’t bother reporting you. Do a quarantine, but you can still go to the supermarket, only once, and don’t worry no one will check. Submit your details for Test and Trace, but we probably won’t get around to calling you or telling you what to do.

This is much more than a recipe for confusion. It’s a clear path towards growing resentment and division between citizens, who find themselves surrounded by Other People behaving badly and not being punished. And from there a collapse in trust between people the institutions they look to for guidance.

Suggested reading

Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Before ministers take another step down this path, they should read The Hidden Wealth of Nations, by David Halpern, which argues that social trust is the essential foundation not just for wellbeing, but for economic growth.

Of course, Halpern is in many quarters persona non grata these days, because of the perceived failings of the Behavioural Insights Team, which he leads, during the early phases of the pandemic. He was on TV mid-March using the phrase “herd immunity” which gave him a passport to cancel-land.

But Halpern’s work on prosperity, published in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is vital reading. He shows that “our ability to get on with our fellow citizens oils the working of markets, lowering the costs of transactions and speeding the flow of information on which economies rely”. Countries and regions with the highest levels of social trust tend to have not just the strongest growth, but the greatest levels of subjective wellbeing, too.

Halpern goes on to observe that: “The resilience of a community or nation to survive through economically difficult times rests heavily on its hidden wealth — not the money that its citizens have squirreled away under their mattresses, but the preparedness of citizens to help each other.”

Britain scored well on this metric in the early months of the pandemic. We volunteered in our hundreds of thousands. We suffered the hardships of isolation or overcrowding in lockdown for the sake of others. We cheered on our care workers. We had a single, simple set of rules that applied to everyone. Even those who disagreed could see that those rules were broadly and justly applied. But since rules got complicated, and attempts at enforcement were replaced by a vague plea to be sensible, that unity and solidarity is ebbing away. In Mid May, the ONS recorded that more than 60% of people believed Britain would be “very” united after Covid-19. By the end of June that was down to 28%.

Halpern’s book is a vital reminder that this division is not just a sideline issue, to be worried about by soggy social scientists. If we can’t find a way to get along, we can’t rescue our economy.

Suggested reading

A portrait of power, warts and all

By James Kirkup

Our Treasury is now desperate for growth. To save town centre economies from collapse, the Government has unilaterally decided that workers are more productive in offices, and is trying to bully people back to them. The Prime Minister launched an all-out war on obesity, and then the Government spent a month subsidising fast food with Eat Out to Help Out. They will reach for anything, no matter how contradictory, to leverage up the economy, and with a wall of redundancies coming this autumn, I can’t blame them

They imagine that the best path to growth is complex public health rules, varied by postcode, age, ethnicity, risk factors, and a general sense of whether you can be bothered doing what the Government says. This is because their mathematical models show that complexity liberates the maximum number of people possible.

But their utilitarian calculation misses out the basic societal principle that all should be equal before the law. If you want a strong, trusting society, then fairness has to be a factor. Halpern’s book suggests to me that if public health strategy divides and discombobulates the population, stimulus will not thrive.

The Government should base its economic and health policies on the goal of rebuilding social capital. Covid-19 brought mass volunteering. It stopped millions from commuting, freeing up more time for family and neighbourhoods. It helped us see the networks and connections between people more clearly than ever. That social trust was not some fluffy distraction from the real business of the economy: it was a great foundation for recovery. We just need to hang on to it before it disappears.

SG Maclean is a historian who lives on the Black Isle in Scotland, which isn’t actually an island. She writes very good crime fiction set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, which isn’t just about Cromwell’s England. She wins prizes for her novels, and deserves more fame to go with them. Especially among people in politics.

On the face of it, Maclean’s Seeker novels are about Damian Seeker, a Yorkshire soldier for Cromwell who becomes the leading enforcer for the Protectorate’s domestic intelligence operation. Slowly and subtly over several books, Maclean explores the essential tension here: how can a fundamentally decent man serve a regime he increasingly recognises as falling short of his own high moral standards?

Seeker’s answers are instructive: because he fought for them once, and against another lot who were worse. But that is not enough to sustain — or deserve — lasting loyalty.

More from this series

The last gasps of a European empire

By Matthew Sweet

It is the theme of loyalty that makes the Seeker novels good reading for politicians, who always need to understand why people support causes — and why they stop.

In the end of the series — so far, at least, for there is hope she will write more — Maclean shows Seeker’s break with the collapsing Cromwell regime not as a grand gesture or an exercise in psychodrama but rather the way real people make big decisions — with a resigned shrug.

Cromwell’s story deserves more attention in the Britain that voted for Brexit. It’s a reminder that, no matter what we tell ourselves about our phlegmatic stability, Britain does indeed do revolutions. Cromwell, of course, was no radical from outside the system. A son of the gentry who sat in Parliament, he led a cause that united disgruntled notables and true grassroots revolutionaries — for instance, the Levellers, who were to be marginalised and bitterly disappointed by Cromwell in power.

Maclean’s hero is part of that non-conformist tradition, a Seeker by faith as well as name, he was part of a small, obscure sect before shifting his faith to Cromwell’s cause and its defence against scheming royalists plotting to restore the dissolute Stuart monarchy.

More from this author

Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown

By James Kirkup

Such royalists are still a major presence in the England Maclean guides her readers through. Because no revolutionary regime can make its opponents simply disappear — accommodations must be made. The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell makes regular appearances as an agent of Seeker’s intelligence operation. Marvell’s precise loyalties were and are unclear: he lionised leading Royalists, but then worked for Thomas Fairfax, the great parliamentary general.

We also meet a young Samuel Pepys, another parliamentarian who converted to Royalism when Cromwell died in 1658.

When that death comes, Seeker is in Bruges tracking the royalist cells that made that city their base while supporting the young Charles Stuart in his designs on the throne amid the shifting backdrop of European politics. This is the setting for the fifth and most recent Seeker novel, The House of Lamentations. It’s a nice way to illustrate the international dimensions of turmoil in British government, as well as a reminder that British leadership worrying about European plots is not a new thing.

The Seeker novels’ lessons for today’s rulers are numerous.  Perhaps the biggest is that taking power is easy enough — just win some big battles — but keeping it is much harder. In the end, the stars of the series are the ordinary folk who lent their support to Cromwell and his cause, but then, tired and resigned, welcome back the Stuart monarchy, albeit briefly. It’s a reminder that while elites take politics and government very seriously, the public on whom those things ultimately depend generally don’t pay too much attention, instead just getting on with their lives. Revolutions are easy to declare but hard to sustain.

Guys, it’s a big ask, I know. Some people who teach 20th-century literature for a living have never dared tackle The Man Without Qualities. It’s huge. Well over 1,000 pages long. You can’t vanquish it in a couple of afternoons by the pool. You might even have to put it on the nanny’s luggage allowance.

But don’t let that put you off. Even its author didn’t finish it. In April 1942, Robert Musil suffered a cerebral haemorrhage after his morning gymnastics. He was 62 and had been working on the novel for around two decades. His wife, who found him dead in the bathroom, reported that his corpse bore an expression of “mockery and mild astonishment”.

What happens in The Man Without Qualities? Nothing much. Characters have long and seductive conversations about the soul, bisexuality, the blossom in the garden. There are weather reports. A bit of incest looms in the last few hundred pages, but Musil’s final workout prevented its consummation. It lacks a few other things, too. It doesn’t take place across a great span of time and space — Musil gives you a year in Vienna, starting in the summer of 1913. There’s no big cast of characters of the sort you find in Proust or Dickens. Ulrich, the title character, isn’t a tragic hero, but a privileged and directionless dilettante with a background in mathematics, a married mistress and a slightly misguided philanthropic interest in a sex murderer called Moosbrugger.

More from this series

Can our leaders cope with freedom?

By Timandra Harkness

But it’s Ulrich’s job that will repay the attention of anyone in power. He is honorary secretary of the Parallel Campaign, a grand project established to celebrate the 70-year jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. It is complex, demanding, a salient matter of state, and completely futile.

Ulrich and his fellow appointees have their work cut out for them. They must decide questions such as “What is true patriotism, true progress, the true Austria?” They must plan a series of spectacular events that will form “a glorious demonstration of vitality”, a “mighty stride forward into the outside world, which would at the same time have a salutary influence on conditions at home”. Most of the committee are content to congratulate themselves simply for saying such things aloud. Ulrich is more insightful. He knows the process will produce nothing. But he doesn’t know what we know: even if these nationalist assertions meant anything, or were possible to realise, the state being celebrated will shortly be dissolved by violent forces beyond its control.

If you’d read this book five years ago, you might have found it comforting. It’s a portrait of a vast, overcomplicated and doomed European entity, fond of long discursive meetings. Plenty to engage a Brexiteer of the sanguine or faint-hearted variety. But this is a modernist masterpiece. If it makes you feel good about yourself, then you’re not reading it properly.

So what are you supposed to draw from it? Don’t take the title as an insult to the PM — Polly Toynbee may have described Boris Johnson as “a man without qualities, devoid of public spirit or regard for anyone but himself … a man to shame the country as its figurehead.” But this is unMusilian: to be without qualities is not a state of moral and intellectual poverty. That’s too easy. Musil is a funny writer, but he’s not an easy one. His protagonist is no self-serving charlatan. Ulrich is possessed of great philosophical and spiritual capital. He knows about history, meteorology, criminology, Buddhism, Leibniz. This wealth, however, remains inconvertible: Ulrich’s command of detail, his passion for ideas, his sensitivity to subtlety and scruple, have brought him to an impasse with himself. And yet, Musil does not ask us to condemn his position, nor even to regard it as an error of judgement.

Told you it was difficult.

More from this author

Enough with the crazy talk, Eamonn Holmes

By Matthew Sweet

That difficulty, though, is why I’d urge the book upon you. The Man Without Qualities is a novel about negotiating a relationship with your historical moment. Ulrich’s moment is one of the classics. Pre-war imperial Vienna, where everyone seems fit for some couch-time at Berggasse 19, and not for the mud and the bullets to come. And yours? Well, 2020 might also turn out to be one of those years. Your country is estranged from her neighbours, uneasy with a US president as capricious as a syphilitic Hapsburg, and authorities unaddicted to two-thumbed boosterism have judged its official response to the coronavirus pandemic to be world-beatingly poor.

Here, though, is a kind of consolation. Musil shows us that the world is too complex to be completely understood or mastered, and that it is foolish to pretend otherwise. If a phrase such as  “take back control”, “super-forecasting” or “oven-ready” was inserted into The Man Without Qualities, you could imagine it shrivelling to death on the page. It’s a book that encourages you to express self-doubt and to have some cognisance of your limits. Because even if you can’t see them, others will. This is why Ulrich, despite his paralysis, is hard to despise. He can’t see the catastrophes to come, but when they do arrive to shake his little knot of nations to pieces, they will not find him in a dreamworld built of empty phrases.

So start it. Get halfway through the first volume, maybe. Skip a few pages, leave it behind in the holiday home, possibly not by accident. That’s completely fine. Failure is an option here. It might be the only option.

The country is in an economic black hole. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown that put all economic life on standby, Britain will soon experience its worst recession since records began. Companies have laid off staff. Unemployment has skyrocketed, and is set to rise further after the furlough scheme ends in October and firms plan for more redundancies.

Britain’s GDP fell in the second quarter by 20.4%  —  the biggest quarterly decline in recorded history. Particular industries reliant on social interaction, such as hospitality and leisure, are facing economic Armageddon. The gravity of this crisis, which will define the 2020s, still has not been fully grasped yet — but it will be soon.

Above all the current economic orthodoxy — what some call “neoliberalism” — already facing a crisis since the 2008 financial crash, has nakedly been revealed to be obsolete. The Government has tried to reboot the economy through incentivising consumer spending with the Eat To Help Out Scheme, but that is chicken feed compared to the radical transformation that is required. There are huge changes needed, and every shade of the political spectrum will have their own interpretation.

Ever since the beginning of this crisis uber-environmentalists, in true Malthusian style, have claimed that Covid-19 showed humans were the “real virus” all along. Inger Andersen, the UN environmental chief, said in March that nature was “sending a message”. They argue that this crisis has revealed the rotten nature of an economic system based on “Promethean” delusions of grandeur such as dominating nature and “infinite growth” in such a way that humanity is playing with “dark forces” it has no idea of, such as novel diseases transmitting from animals to humans.

More from this series

Do our politicians know themselves?

By Niall Gooch

Some see the Covid-19 crisis as the perfect opportunity to reformulate global capitalism around an economic regime based on “degrowth” and a steady state economy where economies are relocalised, cities are decentralised and activities like international travel are reined in.

Against this, members of the cabinet should read Austerity Ecology and Collapse Porn Addicts, published in 2015. The author, socialist writer Leigh Phillips, argues for the value of economic growth, industry, technological progress and production, precisely what will be needed to drag Britain out of this depression.

His book was originally a critique of the Left for betraying its founding values rooted in the Enlightenment and surrendering to Malthusianism, moralistic anti-consumerism and anti-industrial “small is beautiful” ideology, but it could apply as a critique of Right as much as Left.

More from this series

Can our leaders cope with freedom?

By Timandra Harkness

Phillips’s core argument does not deny the reality of climate change or the various environmental challenges that exist. Indeed, he believes that society should grasp onto the forces of industry and technology to lessen the impact on the environment while ensuring innovation and development. For instance, investment in cultured meat could mean Britain satisfying its demand for meat without a single animal needing to be slaughtered — a far more effective way of ensuring animal welfare than moralising vegan puritanism.

Phillips also mentions nuclear power as a way to provide clean energy that is also abundant, while mainstream environmentalists are radically against nuclear energy, not merely because the supposed dangers of exceptional accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but because nuclear can help solve the energy problem without the need for eco-austerity.

Unlike the Government, Phillips is a socialist, so his argument partially holds the free market responsible for the mess we are in, largely because of its irrational tendencies that produce inequalities and externalities against the environment, problems which it can’t solve. He declared: “It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism.” Instead Phillips proposes democratic planning as a more rational way to organise an economy. Even if you are against planning, it is clear the state has to take a more intelligent and prominent role to spur innovation in place of cautious private firms who are more concerned about their profit margins.

More from this series

Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Overall, the impulse towards austerity should be resisted. The only way Britain can get itself out of its economic rot is to grow itself out of it through an economic renaissance. Which means the government researching and investing in new forms of energy, transport and communication, and in new forms of production and industry that can produce new forms of wealth that will enrich society and raise living standards through plentitude and abundance, as well as tackling egregious hyper-exploitation of the natural world.

Phillips’s important cris de coeur can contribute to an alternative, ecologically intelligent vision of neoliberalism that need not be regressive hair-shirted moralism.

C. S. Lewis’s clever, timeless book, The Screwtape Letters, is best known as a work of Christian devotion. This is unsurprising: its very conceit rather presumes the truth of Christianity. The book is a series of letters from a senior devil (the eponymous “Screwtape”) to a junior one (“Wormwood”), with instructions on how to corrupt the soul of a human being.

However, it is one of those texts that can profit almost any reader, because it is fundamentally about self-knowledge and examining one’s conscience. I once heard a Catholic priest say he was amazed that Lewis could write with such insight into human weakness and temptation despite having never heard a confession in his life.

More from this series

Can our leaders cope with freedom?

By Timandra Harkness

Politicians need to learn the discipline of looking at themselves with an unflinching critical eye. So many of the incentives in politics push those in power towards sophistry and deceit, and habitual dishonesty towards others very often leads to self-deception. Or is it perhaps that lying to oneself is a necessary precondition of lying to others? Either way, I find it very hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of self-awareness, whatever their religious beliefs, could read Screwtape without wincing in recognition at least once or twice as Lewis identifies yet another way in which we behave badly or foolishly while convincing ourselves that we are doing nothing wrong.

As our political masters arrive back at their desks after the summer, they will have to start trying to decide what on Earth we do next. They will need prudence and courage and understanding. They will need to take unpopular decisions and face fierce criticism. They will need to be confident that they are genuinely acting for the public good rather than to enhance their own reputation or that of their party.

More from this author

Manners maketh the society

By Niall Gooch

On the face of it, Screwtape is not about such matters. Many chapters deal with domestic themes, notably the unnamed human’s relations with his mother, and later with his girlfriend. There are some striking insights into the difficulties of harmonious living between different people in the same household, and into the bad habits which couples easily develop.

But there are some searing sections on what you might call sins of the intellect, which are a great trap for politicians. In an early chapter Screwtape instructs Wormwood to distort the thought processes of his subject, to encourage the man not to ask whether something is true, but to ask if it is “strong, or stark, or courageous.” In our age the equivalent would be to keep politicians’ mental focus not on whether some policy is right or necessary, but on whether it places them “on the right side of history”.

More from this series

Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Several times, Lewis explores another human weakness against which politicians in particular must guard: sentimentality, that is, a preoccupation with the display of correct feelings instead of the carrying out of our moral duties. Screwtape often instructs Wormwood to keep his “patient” obsessed with his feelings rather than his conduct. For the modern government minister the lesson here is to be on guard against foregrounding your good intentions and your socially acceptable prejudices, rather than thinking about and publicly defending what is the right course of action.

I do not think there are many serious Christians in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet. But there are 22 human beings, with all the normal flaws and blindspots that human beings have. Few books would be as effective as The Screwtape Letters in helping them get to grips with those flaws and blindspots, as we look for a way out of this unprecedented crisis.

My recommendation is a slim book that fits in a pocket, and speaks of “anguish, abandonment and despair”. It’s not exactly holiday reading, but summer’s over, and many Brits will be feeling a combination of all three as the end of the furlough scheme looms and whispers of a second wave proliferate.

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre’s subject is not the anguish of ordinary citizens, though, but the anguish of leadership: of taking on responsibility, in the knowledge that every choice you make will lead to suffering or death. At a time when our politicians have to decide between reducing the risk of more deaths from Covid-19, or reducing the society-wide destruction caused by anti-Covid policies, they need reminding that this anguish is inescapable. Hard choices must be made, and inaction is itself a choice.

More from this series

Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

But there’s far more for our Government to learn from Sartre than simply how to grasp the nettle of leadership. If Twitter is anything to go by, lockdown left many of us grappling with the existential — wondering how to give meaning to our closed-off worlds — and Sartre was the man who first popularised the philosophy. “Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or cauliflower,” he writes. Contrasting existentialism to mechanistic philosophies of human behaviour, Sartre casts a harsh light on theories which “make man into an object”:

All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object — that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone.

Does this remind you of discussions about how best to nudge the population into following government guidelines to prevent infection? It should. Politicians took advice from behavioural psychologists — as Sartre notes, to seek advice, and from whom, is itself a choice — and decided to use fear as a motivating force. The psychologists even warned that fear for personal safety might, in the long run, backfire. Having galloped into lockdown with an air of “we have no choice, people will die!” the Cabinet must now choose the path out, knowing that there is no easy option, and accepting responsibility for their decisions. Could this little book help?

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Existentialism is often criticised as individualistic and abstract; Sartre wrote Existentialism and Humanism as a corrective to these claims. Yes, each person is condemned to be free, to make their own choices and find their own meaning, but we must also recognise that humanity in everyone else. Writing in 1945, with the war against Nazism still ringing in his ears, Sartre spells out that recognising the existential freedom of each individual human must also mean defending the freedom of all humans. “We will freedom for freedom’s sake, and in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends on our own.”

Before you rip off your mask and put your foot down in a 20mph zone, read on. This principled stand, inconveniently, does not imply any specific course of action. The actions you choose in the real world are still your own responsibility. You might decide that wearing a little piece of cloth is preferable to rising infection and consequent lockdown, or that mask-wearing contributes to a culture of fear which constrains us all psychologically.

More from this author

It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

How do you weigh the value of every human life that might be cut short by Covid (or by another cause while Covid dominates health provision and government attention) against the value, to each and all of us, of living life as fully as possible? “Life is nothing until it is lived;” says Sartre, “but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”

Staying alive is not enough. We also need sense, purpose and value in our shared human life. Our leaders must protect not just our lives, but our freedom to live. That is the anguish of leadership. It is the anguish of being human, and therefore free.

A book by an ornithologist may seem an odd recommendation to be giving the Cabinet. Britain’s brief love affair with hearing birdsong was a feature of the lockdown at its most unforgiving: a reminder of the economic deep-freeze that ministers are desperate now to put behind them. The country needs to get back to work. People need jobs and homes. The great engine of the economy needs to be set humming again. The Government will live or die by its ability to fill roads, and offices, and shops.

More from this author

Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

But this only renders my recommendation the more pressing. The solace that people over the course of this unsettling year are finding in the natural world will not have come as a surprise to Mark Cocker. As brilliant a stylist as he is a naturalist, he has a genius for articulating what is felt by many of us, when we take pleasure in the spectacle of wildlife, as something inchoate and unconsidered. In Crow Country, he explained and explored his fascination with the raucous corvids of a single Norfolk valley; in Birds and People, he provided a panoramic analysis of the hold that birds exert on the human imagination across the sweep of the entire globe. Neither book, though, is my recommendation to ministers.

Instead, I offer them Our Place. A study of the role played by conservation charities over the past century, it may — on the face of it — sound rather niche. The kick, though, comes in the subtitle: “Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late?” The answer that Cocker gives to this question is precisely why ministers need to read the book so urgently: “Nature is slipping from these islands: slowly, steadily, inexorably, field by field, dyke by dyke. Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.”

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

Why, in a country that, measured statistically, is the most nature-obsessed on the planet, is this being allowed to happen? Cocker’s book is eye-opening in the way it zeroes in on a bleak irony: that the very obsession of the British with the natural world may have contributed to its degradation. An alphabet soup of charities committed to saving wildlife has served to frustrate any attempt at coherent campaigning — and to break up ecosystems into unsustainably tiny fragments.

Conservation organisations ranging from the Forestry Commission to the National Trust have destroyed swathes of deciduous trees and wild uplands by replacing them with “a loathsomeness of conifers”. The Common Agricultural Policy “effectively bound the country into a federal farming state, against which there was no redress, apart from internal reforms instigated by the EU itself.” The result, over the course of the past half century, has been the ecological equivalent of a doomsday machine.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Why should this matter to ministers grappling with a horrendous array of other challenges and crises? For two reasons. The first is that — with Britain’s departure from the EU — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has opened up to set environmental law on a wholly new track. Those suspicious of the Government’s green credentials may well be justified in fearing the worst — but there is cause for hope as well as pessimism.

As Michael Gove — during his tenure as Environment Secretary — efficiently demonstrated, there is political advantage for the Government in identifying itself with the conservation (or even the re-introduction) of wildlife. It is not only dread-locked activists who fret about extinction. So, too, do fly-fishermen in the Tory shires. And herein lies the second reason. Voters’ appreciation of what the natural world had to offer them during the lockdown will not have faded now that the lockdown itself has been eased. Ministers have a political as well as a moral responsibility not to let the “cold stains of absence” in the map of this country’s wildlife spread any further.

If they do want guidance on the sheer monstrous scale of the problem, and the possible solutions to it, then Cocker’s book — at once a hymn of love to our flora and fauna, and a sombre jeremiad — is the place to start.