THE BOOK OF NIGHTINGALES is a gorgeous book on the most exquisite of small birds. For a thousand years the nightingale has been the most celebrated song-bird in the western world and has inspired French troubadour lyrics, Romantic poems and even war time propaganda. Yet the real nightingale is a drab-coloured migrant. Richard Mabey, our formost writer on natural history, examines why humans have so often fallen under its spell; how it came to inspire Keats, Coleridge and Clare; and what this tells about our own responses to place and season.
