ANYRGB If you have the slightest curiosity about the millions of species with which we share the planet, Simon Barnes’s delightful new book will satisfy and whet it in equal measure. Picking out a hundred from these millions (a selection that ranges from gorillas to earthworms), Barnes provides a crisp, evocative history of each creature – and even better, of humanity’s relationship to it: real and symbolic. Lions, for instance, have been part of human life from the dawn of our species, he writes, drawing evocatively on a pair of footprints from Tanzania’s Laetoli Gorge, possibly made by some adult hominid parent escorting a child to safety some 3.6 million years ago.