Stephen Moss on Mrs Moreau’s Warbler
> A couple of months ago I drove half an hour south-west from home to visit Stephen Moss in Somerset and talk to him about his new book, Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. The interview is part of a new series of podcasts for Faber called Book to Book, in which guests discuss not only their own book but also another title that has been influential to them, perhaps directly, perhaps obliquely. Stephen kicked off the series by choosing a multi-volume partwork from the 1970s, The World of Birds, thereby setting me the interesting challenge: to seek out all 108 parts on eBay, which might be a long-term project as some of them seem hard to come by, or talking to him about it making use of what I could glean about WoB from the Internet. I chose the latter course, and was pleased to discover that The World of Birds was not edited by some faceless team that evaporated without trace, but by a very influential figure in the world of …