Ciara

“The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does flipflops trying to imagine it, because I can't.I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultra-violet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I'm standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“The hawk is unperturbed. She tips her head sideways to look up at the moving clouds - in daylight her irises are flat and shiny and slightly blurred, with pupils that dilate and contract like a camera lens as she focuses -zip-zip-zip- up to track a passing Cessna - and then she turns her head upside down to watch a fly, and then tracks another fly, and pulls abstractedly at the meat I hold in the glove, and watches other things way, way beyond my poor human vision.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Hugh Tomlinson QC described it as 'unclear and confusing' and said it 'should be used with caution.' (Tomlinson 2017)”
― Antony Lerman, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief

“Geoffrey Robertson concluded: 'It is imprecise, confusing and open to misinterpretation and even manipulation' (Robertson 2018)”
― Antony Lerman, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief