BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS

Last year's surprise Christmas bestseller was Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica. This year, Mabey is tilting for our attention with an illustrated reissue of a 1993 book, The Book of Nightingales (Sinclair- Stevenson pounds 12.99), and looks likely to score another palpable hit. Although he veers perilously close to the twee in his evocation of these dull little brown birds and their unearthly, unforgettable song, his combination of travelogue, anecdote, history, confessional and quest has persuasive charm.

Like most "countryside" books, it works by making us nostalgic for something we never knew. We may know about Keats's Ode, or the birds' strange predilection for Berkeley Square, but that's probably all. In this book - the very opposite of an earnestly inclusive anthology - Mabey dawdles around his passion in a relaxed, haphazard way. It's as if he just happens on Max Ernst's surrealist painting Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale, or the bizarre story of cellist Beatrice Harrison, who coaxed birds to sing in harmony with her playing. There's a picture of her, out in the woods with her cello, looking as mad as a mongoose: the results were recorded annually for BBC radio. Oddest of all is a story that explains why the only time I ever heard a nightingale in full song was in Hackney, on a hot night when the urban jungle was at its most siren-filled and threatening: the birds will accompany all sorts of strange rackets. In the 18th year of the cello duets, 1942, the broadcast was interrupted by a mighty droning: the launch of the "Thousand Bomber" raid on Mannheim. But the bird didn't stop, and the BBC recorded a 7-minute duet between a nightingale and a fleet of bombers.