Digested classics / Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

DIGESTED CLASSICS

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The 100 best novels / No 60 / Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
Covers / Evelyn Waugh / Scoop

John Crace

Saturday 7 June 2008

"It's not a bad camp, Sir," said Hooper. "A big, private house with two or three lakes. You never saw such a thing."

"Yes I did," I replied world-wearily. "I've been here before."

I had been there; first with Sebastian more than 20 years before on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the sentences heavy with nostalgia. We had met several months earlier when he had been amusingly sick in my Oxford rooms. He had begged my forgiveness and thereafter allowed me to be his friend.

Digested read / White Teeth by Zadie Smith

DIGESTED READ

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99) digested in the style of the original in 400 words

Fri 28 Jan ‘00 02.56 GMT

Archie Jones is boring. If life is a beach, Archie is a pebble. If it's an ocean or a haystack, he's a raindrop or a needle respectively. But Life says "Yes" to Archie.

"We're not licenced for suicides around here. This place is halal. Kosher, understand?" says Archie's rescuer. Because the grubby north London borough where Archie lives is multicultural. It's a melting pot. It's eclectic. It's besieged with identity crises.

Even boring Archie indulges in a bit of ethnic diversity. Back from the brink, he marries the beautiful and exotic Clara from Lambeth (via Jamaica). He didn't love his first wife, but he loves Clara, who is tall, black and has a bosom that defies gravity. Clara is 30 years Archie's junior and marries him by accident after escaping a Jehovah Witness family and a pile of misplaced copies of the Watchtower .

Archie and Clara spawn Irie who is a nerd and therefore technically marginalised too. The object of Irie's undying love is the dashing Millat Iqbal, who, as an Islamic militant, has also staked out his post-colonial ground. As it turns out, Millat (and twin Magid)'s dad, Samad, is Archie's best mate.

Two families from different sides of the colonial fence whose lives intertwine on a daily basis. Very late 20th century. Very ordinary. Because multiculturalism is ordinary. And in north London boroughs such as this one, shit happens and people get on with their lives.

But Archie and Samad's - a Bengali Muslim and one-armed waiter - friendship goes deeper. They're wartime buddies who, naturally, have a shared secret. They were herded into the same tank and left to bond until peace was declared. And everyone knows wartime friendships are sacred. So when Samad moves to England on the back of the 1970s immigration wave, the two soon re-establish their immutable bond. And anyway, the Bangladeshi Iqbals "aren't those sorts of Indians", Archie reassures Clara.

Zadie Smith

So the Joneses and the Iqbals live happily in multicultural bliss until the second generation realise that ethnic ecleticism presents some serious issues. "Who are we? Where are we from?" they wonder. Then along come the Chalfens with their good genes and progressive ideas about DNA. The Chalfens are radical, progressive and liberal. They're Chalfenists with Chalfenesque ideas and a cloned mouse called FutureMouse. More shit for the kids to deal with.

Magid is sent off to Bangladesh to become a good Muslim and returns as an atheist, anglophile intellectual, such is the topsy-turvy nature of this strange boundary-less world. He thinks the FutureMouse is cool. Millat confuses the glamour of American gangsters with the darker edge of fundamentalism. Extremism looms. Racism is rife. Then there's gender - Irie is fat and obsessive.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. Identity. Destiny. New Year's Eve 1992 and the FutureMouse is unveiled. Family and belonging. It's all so confusing. But then it's a wicked lie that "the past is always tense and the future, perfect", ponders Archie.

• And if you really are pressed: The digested read, digested The Joneses and the Iqbals are different yet similar. Post-colonial Britain is confusing. Identity, race, gender and genetics are serious issues. But that doesn't make ordinary people serious - they just get on with their lives.

THE GUARDIAN

DIGEST READ / KISS

Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013 by Michel Houellebecq

The Poems of TS Eliot / The Annotated Texts, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue 

The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 4 1928-1929 (ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden)

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

DIGEST READ / DRAGON

1999

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

2000

Mirror Image by Danielle Steel

Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

2013

Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow

2016

Maestra by LS Hilton

The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2017

The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young

Love from Boy / Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother

Letters to the Lady Upstairs by Marcel Proust

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Origin by Dan Brown

Over and Out by Henry Blofeld

The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992 by Tina Brown

Rude by Katie Hopkins / Digested read

How to Stay Alive by Bear Grylls

Digested classics / The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham

Digested classics

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham

The 100 best novels / No 44 / Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915) 
Covers / W Somerset Maugham / Of Human Bondage

John Crace

Saturday 15 November 2008

"I thought I heard someone try the door," cried Kitty. "What's to be done if it was Walter?""Dash it all, I've left my solar topee downstairs," said Charlie.

"Well, I don't care if Walter does find out. I hate him."

"Is that the time? Must bolt."

Of course it was stupid for them to have retired to her bedroom after tiffin, but how hateful it was that neither she nor Charlie was free! What a ghastly woman Dorothy was! A good mother and an able Assistant Commisioner's wife, yes! But so old!

Coming to Hong Kong, Kitty had found it hard to reconcile herself to her husband's lowly position as bacteriologist and within three months of marriage she had known she had made a mistake. It had been her mother's fault.

Mrs Garstin was a stupid woman who, disappointed by her own husband's lack of preferment, had focused her ambitions on her prettiest daughter, Kitty. Yet despite the attentions of many admirers, Kitty had reached the age of 25 as yet unmarried and when her younger sister had secured herself a baronet she had panicked and accepted Walter Fane's offer of marriage.

For a while, Kitty had hoped Walter might improve, but once she had succumbed to Charlie Townsend's assured athleticism she could no longer fool herself that Walter was anything other than a short, ugly, charmless nonentity.

"I'm afraid you've thought me a bigger fool than I am," said Walter.

So he did know! Maybe it was for the best!

"Charlie and I are in love," Kitty sobbed, her chest heaving. "We shall be wed."

Walter laughed a cruel laugh. "Townsend will never leave his wife," he sneered. "You are just his plaything. If he promises to leave Dorothy, I will give you a divorce. Otherwise, you must come up country with me to Mei-fan-tu where I've offered to take charge of the cholera epidemic."

How awful! No parties and a fatal disease! It was social suicide!

"Oh Charlie," Kitty wept. "Walter is a beast. We must be wed as you promised."

"Steady on, old girl," Charlie said. "A chap says a lot of things he doesn't mean with his trousers down. You go off with Walter; cholera isn't so bad as long as you don't get it. Must bolt!"

Walter and Kitty barely spoke as they travelled by chair through the inscrutable Chinese hinterland. How frighteningly yellow were the faces that surrounded them! But such a relief to be met by a white man on their arrival! Even if he was bald and ugly.

"The name's Waddington," the man said. "I've cleaned out your hovel since the last missionary died here, so you should be all right. Mind if I pour myself a bottle of whiskey? Helps ward off the cholera! Ho ho!"

Walter would depart their bungalow early each morning and come home late, leaving Kitty to indulge her overwrought fantasies. How she longed to die and yet to live! But as the days passed she began to spend more time with Waddington exploring the village, and found herself reaching a new level of understanding. How shallow she had been up till now!

"Mind the corpses, there's a good girl," Waddington said in a jocular state of semi-inebriation. "Come and meet the French missionaries."

"The Holy Spirit moves in mysterious ways," said the Mother Superior. "Your husband is a saint for trying to save the coolies and you are a saint for being by his side."

How wrong they were to think she was here by choice! But how she had misjudged her husband! See how the nuns felt his nobility! Perhaps if she was to pray she could find a state of grace and love him! Maybe she could even learn Taoism from Waddington's inscrutable Chinese wife! How fat and sleazy Charlie began to seem!

"Come quickly," Waddington said. "Walter is dying."

"Forgive me, please," Kitty begged.

"The dog it was that died," Walter gasped before breathing his last.

Delirium. Or perhaps it was the last line of Goldsmith's elegy that she hadn't read yet somehow knew! If only she could cry for Walter like the stupid, round-faced coolies!

"You must stay with us," said Dorothy, on Kitty's return to Hong Kong.

"I hear you are pregnant," Charlie laughed when they were finally alone. "I hope it's mine. With any luck it's a girl; Dorothy and I only have boys."

"You are a fat, coarse shallow brute," Kitty shouted. "And I've never loved you." But even as she tried to resist him she thrust herself against him in a ridiculous plot twist and begged him to take her. How could she have done it again! She would have to return forthwith to Blighty and pay for her sins by living with her mother!

"I'm afraid your mother is dead," her father said on her return. "And I've never much cared for you, just as you've never much cared for me. I'm off to the West Indies, so you're rather on your own."

How right that she should be abandoned! She had never loved him properly! And yet there was time for them both to make amends.

"My daughter and I will come with you," she said.

"OK then," her father shrugged. "May God's bounty be with us all!"

• John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays.

THE GUARDIAN

Digested classics: The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan

The 100 best novels / No 42 / The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
Covers / John Buchan / The Thirty-Nine Steps
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps / A Life of John Buchan review / A man of no mystery

John Crace

Saturday 4 October 2008

"R

ichard Hannay," I kept telling myself. "Here you are with plenty of money to amuse yourself and you're yawning your head off." That afternoon I had made up my mind that if nothing had happened by the end of the next paragraph I would return to the Cape.

As I was turning the key to my Langham Place flat, I noticed my next-door neighbour at my elbow. "I've been observing you a while," he said, "and you seem like a cool customer who's not afraid of playing a bold hand." I listened while he told me about a plot engineered by the Jew to bring Russia and Germany to war.

"To thwart this fiendish scheme I have to stay alive until June 15th when the Greek Premier, Karolides, comes to London," he continued, "but the enemy are close on my tail. So I've bought a corpse from Harrods that the Boche will think is me and left it in my flat to cover my tracks. Now I just need somewhere to hide.""Wouldn't it have just been easier to go straight to the British government?" I asked.

"That would have rather ruined the book."

I liked the cut of his jib.

"Thank you for playing the white man," he said. "Scudder at your service."

Several days later I found him dead on my living room floor. I had seen bodies before in Matabeleland, but this was different. Scudder was white. I was in the soup. I would be suspected of Scudder's murder and the Boche would know I knew their plans. I had no choice but to lie low in Scotland for 20 days. I found his notebook, persuaded the cockney milkman to lend me his cap by saying, "Gaw blimey, guv'nor", and escaped to St Pancras.I jumped off the train near Galloway, easily escaping the attentions of the police with my veldkraft. Alone that evening in the heather, I opened Scudder's notebook and saw it was written in cipher. With my hallmark cool logic, I had it cracked in 10 minutes.

What I read shocked me to the core. The Jew plot was eyewash. This was bigger than just killing a dago, it was the Boche Black Stone planning to infiltrate the British establishment, kill a Frenchie, steal our plans and sneak out at high tide by the 39 steps at 10.27pm. I stole a car and drove like the wind, escaping the police a second time by driving over a cliff and hanging on to a thorn for dear life.

I set off on foot, encountering Sir Harry, the Liberal candidate, on the road. Something about his aristocratic demeanour made me trust him.

"You are in a pickle, Mr Hannay," he said. "You should talk to my godfather, Sir Walter Bullivant, the PS at the FO who lives in Wiltshire."

I bade him farewell and continued until I came to a remote farmhouse. "Ich have been expecting you," the Black Stone sneered, locking me into a store room. I had unwittingly stumbled on the enemy's lair. I quickly found some explosives, blew a hole in the wall and hid in a dovecote, before running 20 miles to the derelict cottage of a roadman I had befriended earlier.

"Ach, I have no time for the polis," he said, "and I can see you're a gentleman. You can hide out here." I could sense my exploits had already stretched the credulity of a nine-year-old and that I needed a break, so I conveniently succumbed to a recurrence of my malaria for a week.

Eventually my strength returned and I ran through the night from Scotland until I came across a fisherman by a Wiltshire riverbank. It had to be my contact.

"I'm an innocent man, Sir Walter," I gasped.

"Don't worry old boy," he replied. "Scudder told me all about you before he was killed."

Unaware of what a bizarre coincidence it was that I had been directed to Sir Walter or what a complete waste of time my Scotch adventures now were, I fell into a dreamless sleep. I awoke to a sense of anticlimax and a strangely familiar face leaving a private meeting with Sir Walter and four British and French generals.

"That wasn't Lord Alloa," I said, bursting into their room. "That was the Black Stone."

"Good God!" Sir Walter cried. "The Boche are privy to our secrets."

"Not quite yet," I replied. "The Black Stone will want to tell the Boche in person. If we can find him before he gets home to Germany, Britain will be saved."

I pushed Allied high command to one side and studied the maps until I found a pier in Kent with 39 steps where high tide would be at 10.27pm. "There, unless I'm very much mistaken," I said, "we shall find the Black Stone."

"Arrest him quickly," Sir Walter insisted.

"Not so fast. We Brits play by the rules and we can't arrest him until we know he really is the Boche."

I settled down to a long game of bridge with the Black Stone. Damn him, he was good. Just as I was beginning to wonder if he might be British after all, he made a fatal error.

"Only a German would have bid no trumps."

"Gott in Himmel, Hannay. Ze game is hoch!"

THE GUARDIAN

Digested classics / Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Digested classics

 Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Covers / Ford Madox Ford / The Good Soldier 
The 100 best novels / No 41 / The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915) 

John Crace

Saturday 14 February 2009

This is the saddest story I ever heard. Yet I do not know how best to set it down, for this is the dawn of modernism and this is an experimental narrative of recovered memories and broken time-frames that loops and skips to leave you as confused and frustrated as I.

We had known the Ashburnhams for nine years in Nauheim and had assumed an intimacy that only comes from not talking to one another. You will gather from this that my wife, Florence, had a "heart" and from the way I cleverly manipulate the pluperfect that she is now dead.

Captain Ashburnham, Edward, who had had a successful military career in India, and, Leonora, whom I loved, though without the sex instinct - far too much effort for one so languidly detached as myself - would dine with us each night. Florence and I were Americans abroad, Teddy and Leonora the perfect British gentry; together we were good people who never did anything very much.It was 1913 when Florence grasped Teddy's arm as we were visiting a Protestant shrine and I noticed Leonora blanch. A more engaged and reliable narrator might have been disturbed by his wife's intimacy with another man, but I was satisfied when Leonora explained her reaction as that of an injured Irish Catholic.

Besides, Florence had given me no reason to suspect she had been Teddy's lover for nine years. If I had heard heavy breathing emanating from her locked bedroom, to which she retired alone each night at nine o'clock, then I understandably assumed they were the consequences of acute arrhythmia. So I assured Leonora I would only insult her co-religionists once per chapter and thought no more about it.

It was only after Teddy had died that Leonora told me of the Kilsyte case, where he had improperly kissed a servant girl, of his attachment to Major Basil's wife, of his affair with Maisie Maidan and of his unfortunate amour with the mistress of a Russian grand-duke that had cost him £40,000 and forced Leonora to take control of his assets to save them from bankruptcy.

And yet, in my familiar annoyingly perverse manner, I do not judge Teddy, for he was a good man, who was kind to tenants and small animals, and it is hard not to see he was trying to keep his philandering in order because each mistress was better bred than the last. If he had a fault, it was that he was a sentimentalist; and if I had a fault, it was that I was so absorbed in being the perfect stylist, repeating the perfect adjectives to ever more perfect effect, that I failed to notice my IQ was hovering near zero.

Did I mention that Maisie Maidan had died on 4 August? Perhaps not. How artfully artless of me! But then everything important in Florence's life had happened on that date. She had been born on 4 August and we also got married on that day - one I remember well as it was the last time I showed any passion, not sexual of course, but by hitting my darky servant for no good reason, other than that is how a gentleman from Philadelphia behaves.

And of course poor Florence committed suicide on that date, not that I realised she had killed herself at first, but then as I had turned stupidity into an art-form, it was at least in keeping for me not to notice. Leonora tells me the first thing I said was: "Now I can marry the girl."

I don't recall that, but even though Leonora is a Romanist, I see no reason to disbelieve her.

Ah, the girl! Leonora's ward, Nancy Rufford. Silly me again for not mentioning her earlier! Teddy was a good man and I honestly believe he was struggling to maintain a propriety in his feelings with the young woman and that Florence might have misunderstood his intentions. Not that that is why she took her life. Rather that she had returned to the hotel to find me talking to one of her relatives and assumed he must have told me about her inappropriate sexual liaison before we met.

He hadn't, as I only discovered that later, though I see now her family had once tried to warn me about her affair, that had also begun on 4 August, but it's hard to heed such advice when one's head is located so securely inside one's rectum, but Florence wasn't to know that when she swallowed the prussic acid.

I suppose the deceived husband ought to have been angry with Teddy, but I was a sentimentalist too and I truly loved him so much that some critics suspected me of being a closet homosexual. The person I really hated was Leonora. It was she who had pimped for Teddy, she who had led me to believe I might marry Nancy.

It was Leonora, too, who had conducted her own Papist affair with Rodney Bayham and had married him after Teddy's suicide. Yes, it quite slipped my mind that Teddy took his own life when Leonora forced Nancy to return to India. Nancy went quite mad on the boat and Teddy never forgave himself.

Ford Madox Ford

So now I sit, the American millionaire, waiting for the next 40 boring years to pass, listening to Nancy repeating the word "shuttlecock". Sometimes I even think of Teddy lying in the barn with his throat slit and how I saw him take out the pen knife but was too exhausted to stop him. Yes, it is a very sad story.

• John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays.

THE GUARDIAN

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Possession by AS Byatt

Crash by JG Ballard

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Claudine in Paris by Colette

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Brideshead Revisited by EvelynWaugh 

Howards End by EM Forster

Mrs Dallaway by Virginia Woolf

Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks – digested read

‘After we came back from the moon, we all went home for some nice apple pie. Whoopety-doodah-day’

John Crace
Sun 22 Oct ‘17 00.00 BST

Illustration by Matt Blease

Three Exhausting Weeks

Anna and I were rummaging through some old typewriters in a secondhand store as a gift for MDash, a sub-Saharan immigrant who was about to become as American as Apple Pie.

“Hey, Gumpy,” she said. “Let’s go out on a date.”

Now let me tell you that Anna is a triathlete with the body of a triathlete, while I like to sit around doing not very much and thinking nice thoughts about how lovely everything in America can be.

On the first day together, she put her hand inside my pants. And I put my hands inside her pants. Things progressed pretty quickly after that. Whoopety-doodah-whoppety-day!

“You’re a nice guy, Gumpy,” she said. “But you have to shape up a bit. Pack a bag, you’re coming with me on a business trip to Fort Worth.”

After we had sex, I began to feel a bit unwell. “I think I’m getting a cold,” I said. Anna told me I needed to take some vitamins and release the toxins through my feet. I thought I’d take some ibuprofen.

I did get better eventually but on the 21st day of our relationship Anna said, “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

“Neither do I,” I replied.

But we stayed friends. Which was nice.

Christmas Eve, 1953

Virgil had walked up the garden path that was lined with snow. “Happy Christmas Eve, everyone,” he said. “Happy Christmas, Eve,” his family had replied. Once he had taken his coat off, Virgil got out his old typewriter and got his kids to write their letters to Santa before sending them off to bed. “Make sure you go to sleep or Santa won’t come,” he told them before settling down to wrap presents with his wife.

Just before bedtime, the phone rang. As it always did on Christmas Eve. “Hi, Bud,” he said. “Would you believe it’s 10 years since Christmas Eve, 1944?”

“Actually, it’s only nine years, Private Ryan.”

Bud and Virgil had landed on the Normandy beach at exactly the same time and had witnessed many of their comrades get killed. Which wasn’t nice. They had fought through France together until Christmas Eve 1944 when a shell had blown Virgil’s leg off. Bud had carried him to the medics. Which was nice.

“Are you sure you don’t want to visit?” Virgil asked. Bud declined. “We’ll speak again next year then.” Virgil hopped up the stairs and went to bed. It was great to be an American. Though he was sad about his fallen comrades who would be missing Christmas.

Our Town Today with Hank Fisek

So many rumours here today at da paper! Some people say the Tri-Cities Journal might go digital. But I much prefer typing my column on an old typewriter. Which is nice.

Alan Bean Plus Four

I can’t remember whose idea it was to go to the moon. Almost certainly not mine, as I am a bit dopey. It was probably Anna’s as she is the most driven woman I know. She is a triathlete with the body of a triathlete. MDash bought the food, I bought the capsule off an old woman for $100 – making sure I got a typewritten receipt – and we took off from Steve Wong’s back yard.

“Whoopety-doodah,” I yelled as we went into orbit.

“Whoopety-doodah-day,” everyone else yelled in response.

I had named the capsule Alan Bean after the lunar astronaut whom I had once met buying toothpaste in a branch of Walmart in downtown Oakland and we all felt very cosy as we went to the moon.

Anna checked the Lunar Trajectory app and said, “Time to press the button for lunar orbit, Gumpy.” Much to my surprise the dark side of the moon wasn’t dark at all. It was just that we never got to see it from Earth. The so-called dark side looked much the same as the bright side.

“We’ve all been to the moon in Alan Bean,” I said to the crew who picked us up in the Pacific.

“That’s nice,” they said.

Then we all took the bus home in time for some nice apple pie.

Go See Costas

Assan was pleased to have escaped communist oppression in Bulgaria. Even if he had had to flee the country on a boat without his typewriter. He had worked hard on the boat because he knew that’s what American people would expect of him.

After he had landed in New York, he had met a fellow refugee who told him a man called Costas would give him a job in his restaurant.

“Can I have a job, please?” Assan asked. “No,” said Costas.

The next day, Assan went back and asked again. Costas still said no. On the third day, Assan returned again.

“I suppose you still want a job,” said Costas.

“No, I just want a coffee.”

“Well, tough. You can have a job.”

Assan smiled. Persistence and hard work paid off in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Our Town Today with Hank Fisek

I still like writing on my typewriter, even though I’ve been sacked.

Steve Wong is Perfect

Anna, who is a triathlete and has the body of a triathlete, MDash, Steve Wong, who worked in Home Depot, and I all went bowling. One thing I haven’t told you is that Steve Wong used to be a champion bowler.

That evening he threw 60 perfect strikes. A TV station got to hear about this and offered him $100,000 if he could throw another 60 perfect strikes.

“I don’t know about this,” he said. “I only like bowling for fun.”

Anna persuaded him the money could be useful so Steve Wong agreed. After throwing another 60 perfect strikes and collecting the check, Steve said it hadn’t been fun and he was only going to bowl for fun from now on.

“You haven’t mentioned a typewriter, Gumpy,” said Anna.

“Typewriter.”

Digested read, digested: Common Hype.

THE GUARDIAN

The Unexpected Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke – digested read

‘Penguins? A bunch of pathological narcissists. Pandas? Addicted to three-way sex. Toads? Complete bastards’


John Crace
Sun 29 Oct ‘17 17.00 GMT

Illustration by Matt Blease

S

cientists have been misunderstanding animals for centuries. We viewthe animal kingdom through the prism of our own rather narrow existence. This has got to stop. It is driving many creatures into therapy. Bats are literally going bats. We need to open our minds – and let them tell their own stories.

Beaver My name is Beaver and I’m a beaver. If I hear one more story about how I like to chew off my own gonads and throw them at people, I’m going to shoot myself. My reproductive organs are just configured differently. I can’t help it if my balls smell so great that Givenchy use them in their perfumes. But do stop bigging up my achievements. Basically, we beavers are a bit thick. It’s pure luck we don’t get squashed by more trees. Play us the sound of running water and we’ll start building you a dam.

Sloth As president of the sloth appreciation society, I’ve spent many a thrilling hour watching sloths move, and I can confirm that their average cruising speed is a leisurely 0.3 kilometres an hour. But rather than thinking of sloths as slow, a characterisation imposed on them by French naturalist Le Comte de Buffon, we should see things from their point of view. Walking slowly and deliberately, like a tai chi master, enables them to silently sneak up on foliage unnoticed so they can pounce before it has a chance to escape. Also, why bother to walk any quicker when you only need to have one poo every eight days?

Frog They come in three sizes: small, medium and large. They are also among the fittest amphibians on the planet. Even when stuck at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, the Telmatobius culeus never misses a daily workout of 50 press-ups followed by three sets of 10 bench presses. What has mesmerised humans about the frog is its reproductive cycle. Aristotle was of the impression that frogs emerged spontaneously out of mud, but thanks to French scientist Réaumur, we now know that is not true. Réaumur attached a pair of underpants – fastened with braces to make sure they didn’t fall off – to a male frog then showed it lewd photographs of a female. Never confuse a frog with a toad. Toads are complete bastards.

Hippopotamus Since the days of the Roman empire, the hippo has been portrayed as a monstrous, fire-vomiting “river horse”. In fact, it is much more like a whale, apart from the fact that it has feet and doesn’t eat plankton. It was originally thought that the red liquid it expelled was blood, which led Pliny to advocate blood-letting as a medical cure, but research has now proved that it is in fact a sophisticated factor-50 suncream. Interesting fact: there are now cartels of coke-dealing hippos in Colombia after several broke out of Pablo Escobar’s zoo in the early 1990s.

Panda An endangered species, thanks to having targets on their eyes, pandas have undeservedly gained the reputation for being a bit shy and uptight about sex. Far from being retiring types who can have sex only with the lights off, pandas are among nature’s most enthusiastic shaggers. So much so that they can usuallyget aroused only if there is a threesome. Were Edinburgh zoo to get hold of another panda to spice things up for Tian Tian and Yang Guang, they might get the baby panda cub they so dearly want.

Penguin No animal has been more wilfully misrepresented. The thing you’ve got to remember about penguins is that they are a bunch of pathological narcissists. Stick David Attenborough in front of them, or sign them up for a March of the Penguins movie, and they’ll come over all cute and cuddly. Oh look at us! Aren’t we so noble because we band together against the cold? And no, I couldn’t possibly sleep with you because I’m already married. I’m monogamous, me. Take away the cameras, though, and it’s a scene of utter degradation. Worse than The Jeremy Kyle Show. Not only will you get penguins tripping one another up so they get eaten by whales, they will quite happily spend the afternoon lobbing stones at one another and shooting smack. And don’t get me started on sex! A penguin will quite literally shag anything. Male, female, children. Even a dead penguin. Disgusting. Take it from me. Penguins are evil.

Digested read, digested: We need to talk about Penguin.

THE GUARDIAN