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Books

How could enlightened 18th-century Britain have believed that a woman could give birth to rabbits?

7 February 2020

10:00 PM

7 February 2020

10:00 PM

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder Karen Harvey

OUP, pp.224, £16.99

Does a practical joke differ from a hoax? It could be a matter of scale. Anyone can deploy a whoopee cushion, but it takes rather more — as Virginia Woolf and others did, long before Ali G — to kit oneself out as Abyssinian royalty for a 1910 state visit by train to the deck of a dreadnought in Weymouth harbour.

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