Zoos are returning to the integrated, environmental animal parks of ancient Mesopotamia, but in a more sophisticated manner. And at the same time, wild nature itself is becoming a megazoo — just a different kind of captivity.

Any reader turning to the original novel would hardly recognize it in the shadow of Hitchcock’s film, so preoccupied is it with describing the glens and heathery mountains of the Scottish highlands, inhabited with an unlikely cavalcade of native eccentrics: an innkeeper with literary aspirations, a Liberal candidate with pacifist sympathies, a lower-class roadman laid up by drink, a bald archaeologist who isn’t quite what he seems.

Dr D’Felice admitted flexisexuality had become fashionable as a result of its recent celebrity endorsement, but said it had always existed.

Yet, once more, the ripping of words and sentences is counterbalanced by a patching up process. Indeed, thanks to an overflowing of compound words, [Arundhati] Roy is also stitching up words, recomposing her text from its fragments; and the more tattered language is, the easier is it to patch it up, as if the verbal profusion and creation were a way of compensating the profusion of holes and rents.