Nineteen fifty-six in Britain was a cold, grey year. Through February the temperature never rose much above zero; the bitter back end of winter segued into the wettest summer in a decade. Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, published that October, must have appeared through the murk like sunshine. It was an instant and extraordinary bestseller. The first two impressions sold out before publication. By the end of the month Durrell had outsold everyone on the nonfiction shelves bar Winston Churchill. The book has never since been out of print.

Which was more or less as Durrell had planned it. He had, he later told his friend David Hughes, “sat down consciously to manufacture a best-seller”. The book, he decided as he settled down to work in the summer of 1955, would have three compelling ingredients: the Durrell family, the sun-steeped landscape of Corfu, and the native animals and people of the island. The strategy was to skip from one to another so deftly that the reader never had time to grow weary.

I had no idea, when I was eight or nine, how famous Durrell was. It wasn’t him or his family or the Corfu sunshine that I was interested in; it was the animals. The first book of his that I encountered was a creased Fontana paperback of Catch Me a Colobus from my mum’s bookcase. By the time of the book’s publication in 1972, Durrell had been running his Jersey zoo for more than a decade; his escapades in pursuit of new animals dovetailed neatly with my primary literary passion at the time, the Adventure books by Willard Price. (I’m sure I was not alone among boys in the 1980s in living out a vicarious 1950s boyhood on the page). A little later came Durrell’s The Amateur Naturalist, for which my mum had to reimburse the local library because I left my borrowed copy out in the rain – and it was this, a how-to book co-written with his second wife, Lee, that really ensnared me, made me obsess about nature, made me ache to build gauze-fronted boxes for butterflies, or taxidermize a mouse (I still never have).

For me, My Family and Other Animals simply fitted in among all this, without particularly standing out, even though I, of course, watched the BBC television adaptation, broadcast when I was nine. And I think this wasn’t…