And another

Review of Tree of Rivers, this time in the Sunday Times; including the best part of a paragraph about one of my favourite English eccentrics, someone who gets a few pages in In Search of the English Eccentric, the naturalist Charles Waterton:

We meet Charles Waterton, “the first Englishman to write in praise of tropical forests”. In his later years he turned his Yorkshire estate “into a wildlife sanctuary full of artificial burrows and nests...liked to dress as a scarecrow and sit in trees”, and “launched the world's first successful legal action over environmental pollution, against the owner of a nearby soap-works whose chimneys released noxious chemicals”.