Rose George

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed. But another dead man is the focus of this book: our hero is the captivating, frustrating, brutal Emile Griffith, who we meet at the age of 22, ‘happy and beautiful’, and who one year later battered to death the Cuban fighter Benny Paret, the first man whose death was shown live on television (the second was Lee Harvey Oswald).

The oceans cover seven-tenths of our planet, and although it may not seem like it above the surface, they are very busy. Helen Scales and Christian Sardet are marine biologists: Sardet is apparently known as Uncle Plankton, and those multitudes of drifting organisms — ‘plankton’ comes from the Greek planktos, meaning to wander or drift — are his life’s work. Scales’s focus is the shell-making creatures that are molluscs, though focus seems an inappropriate word for such a vast body of life: a 1993 survey of just one island, New Caledonia, found 2,738 distinct species, and 80 per cent of them were new to science.