I might be a cold fish but I cannot bear – cannot bear – the idea of anything happening to Knut. Just the thought of it makes me start to choke up. As with the baby in Children of Men, so the polar cub and world star Knut seems to hold the future of our world in his paws. In the middle of reading the totally horrid and hideously scary 6 DEGREES – an account of global warming, in which polar bears are among the first to get it when the icecaps completely melt – the notion of our losing a single polar bear for any reason is too awful to contemplate.

– Fenton Bailey