The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and is also the most mythologized of birds. Nightingale juxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers and natural historians, from Aristotle, Keats and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan, Nightingale charts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale’s disappearance from British breeding grounds, and the implications this has for its conservation.
