¹ H. B Wheatley and P. Cunningham, London Past and Present (London, Murray, 1891), vol. 1, p. 109.

 

² See web appendix: www.richarddawkins.net/afw.

 

³ And whose obituary I wrote: see web appendix.

 

⁴ http://wab.uib.no/ojs/agora-alws/article/view/1263/977

 

⁵ ‘Growing up in ethology’, ch. 8 in L. Drickamer and D. Dewsbury, eds, Leaders in Animal Behavior (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010).

 

⁶ From Randigal Rhymes, ed. Joseph Thomas (Penzance, F. Rodda, 1895).

 

⁷ Fuss.

 

⁸ Store for live bait.

 

⁹ Swallowed.

 

¹⁰ Pebble, though my grandmother translated it as plumstone, which makes more sense.

 

¹¹ Properly.

 

¹² Throat.

 

¹³ Choked.

 

¹⁴ Retched.

 

¹⁵ Stamped.

 

¹⁶ Mad.

 

¹⁷ Local proverb.

 

¹⁸ Forelock.

 

¹⁹ Stoat, weasel.

 

²⁰ Somersault.

 

²¹ Medicine distilled from peppermint.

 

²² Nonsensical story.

 

²³ Swallowed a frog.

 

²⁴ Mischievous imp.

 

²⁵ Truant.

 

²⁶ Pitch and toss.

 

²⁷ Tie a tin can or something to an animal’s tail.

 

²⁸ Rob.

 

²⁹ Briskly strode.

 

³⁰ Back of the head.

 

³¹ Cow parsleys are in bloom.

 

³² I’ve consulted an expert on Scandinavian languages, Professor Björn Melander, and he agreed with my theory of ‘insult or flattery’ but added that there are, inevitably, complications of context.

 

³³ ‘Vacuum tubes’ in American English.

 

³⁴ ‘Askaris’ was the name given to the African rank and file in the KAR.

 

³⁵ My wife’s and my private word for heartlessly rule-loving bureaucrats, a word that I am trying to introduce into the English language. It comes from a comic novel by Tom Sharpe, in which J. Dundridge epitomized the type. It’s such a suitable-sounding word. For a new word to qualify for the Oxford English Dictionary it must be used sufficiently often in the written language, without definition or attribution. I speak from experience and am delighted to say that an earlier coining, ‘meme’, has met the criterion and is safely perched among the Ms. Please use dundridge and give it currency.

 

³⁶ Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (New York, Viking, 2011).

 

³⁷ Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984).

 

³⁸ http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2127-george-scales-war-hero-and-generous-friend-of-rdfrs.

 

³⁹ American: Erector Set.

 

⁴⁰ Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Oxford (London, Methuen, 1944).

 

⁴¹ ‘Evolution in biology tutoring?’, in David Palfreyman, ed., The Oxford Tutorial: ‘Thanks, you taught me how to think’ (Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, 2001; 2nd edn 2008). When the essay first appeared (in The Oxford Magazine, No. 112, Eighth Week, Michaelmas Term 1994), it bore the ‘deliberately graceless’ title ‘Tutorial-Driven’, in reflection of the ‘lecture-driven’ teaching I was criticizing.

 

⁴² Hans Kruuk, Niko’s Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and his Science of Animal Behaviour (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).

 

⁴³ Robert Mash, How to Keep Dinosaurs (London, Orion, 2005).

 

⁴⁴ N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1951).

 

⁴⁵ R. Dawkins, ‘The ontogeny of a pecking preference in domestic chicks’, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 25 (1968), pp. 170–86.

 

⁴⁶ Peter Medawar, The Art of the Soluble: Creativity and Originality in Science (London, Methuen, 1967); Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982).

 

⁴⁷ R. Dawkins, ‘A threshold model of choice behaviour’, Animal Behaviour, 17 (1969), pp. 120–33.

 

⁴⁸ R. Dawkins and M. Impekoven, ‘The peck/no-peck decision-maker in the black-headed gull chick’, Animal Behaviour, 17 (1969), pp. 243–51.

 

⁴⁹ R. Dawkins, ‘The attention threshold model’, Animal Behaviour, 17 (1969), pp. 134–41.

 

⁵⁰ American: Rube Goldberg.

 

⁵¹ The clearest explanation is given by my Oxford colleague and sometime graduate student Professor Alan Grafen, ‘A geometric view of relatedness’, in R. Dawkins and M. Ridley, eds, Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, vol. 2 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 28–89.

 

⁵² The American equivalent would be ‘assistant professor going on associate professor’.

 

⁵³ R. Dawkins, ‘A cheap method of recording behavioural events for direct computer access’, Behaviour, 40 (1971), pp. 162–73.

 

⁵⁴ R. Dawkins, ‘Selective neurone death as a possible memory mechanism’, Nature, 229 (1971), pp. 118–19.

 

⁵⁵ R. and M. Dawkins, ‘Decisions and the uncertainty of behaviour’, Behaviour, 45 (1973), pp. 83–103.

 

⁵⁶ R. Dawkins, ‘Hierarchical organization: a candidate principle for ethology’, in P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde, eds, Growing Points in Ethology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 7–54.

 

⁵⁷ Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, translated by Marjorie Latzke (London, Methuen, 1964); first published in German as Das sogenannte Böse – ‘the so-called evil’ – in 1963. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (London: Collins, 1967), and The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources or Order and Disorder (London, Collins, 1970).

 

⁵⁸ George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1966).

 

⁵⁹ Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (New York, Norton, 2013).

 

⁶⁰ John Maynard Smith, The Theory of Evolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; first published London, Penguin, 1958).

 

⁶¹ I suspect him of being the original source of a widely circulated anecdote about the film star Diana Dors. She and he came from the same Wiltshire town and were childhood friends. Her real surname was not Dors but Fluck. She was invited back to open some fête or other, and the vicar, thinking to introduce her by the name the locals would have known, genially asked them to welcome the lovely ‘Diana . . . Clunt’.