Look and Learn interview

A nice big interview about The Bumper Book of Look and Learn appears in today's Sunday Telegraph (26 August) where Nigel Farndale trumpets (and quite tunefully, too) the 'Comic Genius' that is Look and Learn. You can read the feature at the Telegraph's website which heralds 'The Return of Look and Learn'.

Nigel brought some interesting observations of Maxwell Knight to the interview as he studied Knight as part of his research for the book Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William & Margaret Joyce (London, Macmillan, 2005): "Readers had no idea that before becoming a naturalist he had been the head of B5(b), a semi-autonomous department within MI5. As a spymaster, his tasks had included the surveillance of extremists and the recruitment of agents -- among them William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, the last man to be hanged for treason for broadcasting Nazi propaganda during the Second World War. Knight was a deeply eccentric figure, a bisexual who kept a meagerie, which included bears, parrots and snakes, in his Chelsea flat. His reputation never recovered from his failure to uncover the Cambridge spy ring and, in 1956, he reinvented himself as Uncle Max, a BBC broadcaster specialising in natural history talks for children."