Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage | Peter Forbes
Now Available from Yale University Press
You keep noticing things after reading Dazzled and Deceived, Peter Forbes’s cultural history of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art and warfare. Take those warning notices, telling us to stop on the road, or those signalling that there is a radiation hazard, or that there is a computer malfunction. They come in at least two of four bright colours: red, yellow, black and white. And these are also the colours nature uses to warn that a creature is dangerous or inedible – so don’t even think about it.
Nature can teach us some tricks, and it seems we learned the warning colour lesson pretty instinctively. But when it come to what nature can teach us about camouflage in warfare, oh what squabbles erupted between artists, naturalists and the military! Dazzled and Deceived threads its way though these all-too-human assertions and evasions. Nevertheless, from the dazzle painting of ships in WWI, through the great chessboard bluffs of the El Alamein campaign in WW2, to the sophisticated US Marines’ MARPAT camouflage today, nature’s deceptive tricks did contribute to the arts of war.
And now mimicry and camouflage are in the front line as a test case of evolution in action. Just what are the genes that enable, say, a young Eremias lugubris lizard in the Kalahari to mimic so convincingly a totally different creature: the toxic oogpister beetle? One hundred and fifty years ago, Darwin asked: ‘Why to the perplexity of naturalists has nature condescended to the tricks of the stage?’ The answer, from modern Evo Devo studies, will very likely produce the most complete picture of evolution in action.
REVIEWS
“Forbes … sees with lovely clarity that nature, like art, is a bricoleur, a tinkerer, and that the thrill of it all is not in a stately grand design … but in life’s multiple choices, chances and smallscale experiments: so many possibilities.” – Veronica Horwell, The Guardian
“An intriguing and fluent narrative.” – Marek Kohn, The Independent
“In a revealing and entertaining review of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art, and war, journalist Peter Forbes explores a wide range of eye-fooling strategies, such as the one discovered by Thayer…Forbes rightly portrays camouflage and mimicry as examples of how natural selection can act in subtle and surprising ways. His book will open your eyes to aspects of the natural world that may have passed you by, unnoticed.” – Natural History Magazine
“The first thing to say is that the full title of this biography is Charles Dickens: a life defined by writing and this is the main thrust of Michael Slater’s book. His personal life, his marriage, his separation from his wife, his children and his later love, Nellie Ternan, though appearing in the narrative are kept pretty much in the background and are only mentioned in relation to his writing and his state of mind at any particular moment – this biography concentrates on Dickens the author. There are other excellent biographies of Dickens which explore the, for want of a better phrase, his ‘love life’ and the lack of lurid information in this particular book did not worry me – I know I can find details elsewhere.
No, as I said this is all about Dickens the author and my goodness me – half way through this book I was simply breathless at the sheer scale of his output. No laptops, no dictaphones, just pen and ink (did he ever suffer from what we now call RSI- surely he must have done) and an abundance of drive and energy. We all know that Dickens wrote his novels in serial form to a deadline for the eagerly awaiting readers who rushed out in their thousands to buy the latest edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son and all those well known works that we only know and read in book form. The pressure was immense because as well as producing these instalments, often on a weekly as well as a monthly basis, he was quite often involved in the editing and production of the particular magazine and also wrote articles on a regular basis. Two of his most well known journals were Household Words and All the Year Round and, as stated, as well as being editor and contributor he had to find copy and stories from other authors and writers as well. Wilkie Collins was a particularly close friend and The Woman in White and The Moonstone were just two of his well known works that were first brought to the attention of the public in one of these magazines. Mrs Gaskell another. (Hesperus books have reprinted some of these and are well worth getting hold of). A Christmas Carol was such a huge success that a Dickens for Christmas then became the norm so the special edition had to be produced and prepared often months in advance and all while Dickens was planning and writing the next novel. At one stage he was writing instalments of the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist at the same time…” Read more
Review courtesy: Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover (TypePad Featured Blog)
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater
Published by Yale University Press, August 2009
“My series unlocks the front door of the Englishman’s castle to peer into the privacies and intimacies of life at home over the last 400 years”, she says. “ ‘A History of Private Life’ will recreate for the general public the real texture and fabric of life at home in the past”.
From the Tudor castle to the interwar semi, the Georgian town house to the imperial bungalow, Professor Amanda Vickery unlocks the secrets of English domestic life. Over the coming months Professor Vickery, from the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers her own interpretation of 400 years of private life.
Professor Vickery’s new thirty-part BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of Private Life’ starts on 28 September, while her book on the Eighteenth Century Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England is set to hit shelves in October.
Professor Vickery was recently awarded a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to collaborate with Loftus Productions to relay scholarly research to a thinking audience far beyond the academy with her radio series. The Fellowship has enabled Professor Vickery, who writes and presents the series herself, to work closely with Sony award-winning producer Elizabeth Burke. Together they have transformed Amanda’s extensive research into an entertaining radio series. Professor Vickery found it thrilling to collaborate with actresses such as Deborah Findlay and jazz artist Gwyneth Herbert, drawing on period music and original documents to capture the mood and spirit of the past.
“Winning the BBC Radio 4 commission and the Knowledge Transfer Fellowship gave me a golden opportunity to broadcast my research to a wide audience, and to develop an imaginative and ambitious narrative of 400 years of English history”. read more…
“Millions of men – who in many cases had been away for years – returned to their families in 1945. But was it a happy homecoming? A new book tells their stories …”
Snapshots of gaiety and celebration – the street parties, the victory speeches – are how some people today think of Britain in 1945. But the years following the end of World War II were far from a ‘golden age’ of pride and self-confidence. The country was troubled though triumphant, subject to continued rationing and political change. Wracked by social disorder, austerity and disillusion, Britain was exhausted – and it was the return of those men who had fought for their country who seemed to be a root cause of the trouble. Demobbed is the real story of what happened when millions of ex-servicemen returned home. Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labour force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. ‘Problem veterans’ preoccupied the entire country. Alan Allport draws on their personal letters and diaries, on newspapers, reports, novels and films to illuminate the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families and society at large – a gripping story that’s in danger of being lost to national memory.
Post-Blogging the British Demobilisation Experience: June 1945 – June 1946 – click for latest entries
| SEPTEMBER | BOOK | EVENT DETAILS |
| 14th |  |
Author to speak at “Swift/Sibos” event, Hong Kong |
| 15th |  |
Author to speak at the Frontier Club, London. |
| 17th
19th 23rd |
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Author to give a talk at Pages Bookshop, Hackney. Discussion and book signing at 7:30pm at the Poetry Cafe 22 Betterton St. London, WC2H 9BX (free event) Discussion and book signing at 7:30pm at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge |
| 24th |  |
Book launch at Birkbeck College, University of London |
| OCTOBER | ||
| 5th |  |
Author to speak at the 20th anniversary celebration of the
Centre of Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. |
| 21st | |
Author to give keynote speech at the European High Yield
Association conference at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. |
| 27th |  |
Author to speak at Blackwells, Broad Street, Oxford. |
| NOVEMBER | ||
| 3rd | |
Author to speak at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge. |
| 10th |  |
Author to give a talk for the Scientific & Medical Network in
North London. |
