I still remember the slight intimidation with which I first opened Desmond Morris. I was a college student in the 1980s, full of curiosity but not always equipped for the English books that were beginning to widen my world. Before I reached him, progressive friends had urged me to read Insaan Barra Kaisay Bana.

That was the Urdu translation of a Soviet popular science work How Man Became a Giant, by Mikhail Ilyin and Elena Segal. That book had already nudged me towards questions of human origins, social development and the long story of how humans became what they are.

So, when I finally picked up The Naked Ape by chance at an old book shop, I did so with excitement but also with hesitation. I still have that old book in my collection. I struggled through its English, often reading slowly, sometimes with effort, but from the very first pages I felt that I had encountered a writer who would stay with me for life.

Desmond Morris, who died on April 19, 2026, aged 98, had that effect on many readers. He made human beings seem at once less grand and more fascinating. To the world, Morris was many things at once: zoologist, broadcaster, painter, public intellectual and best-selling author. To millions he was the man who wrote The Naked Ape in 1967 and startled readers by suggesting that, beneath all our culture, manners, institutions and conceits, we remained animals still marked by our biological inheritance.

Desmond Morris, who has died aged 98, was a zoologist, broadcaster, painter, public intellectual and best-selling author. Naazir Mahmood, who first encountered him as a college student in Gen Zia’s Pakistan, reflects on what it meant to find a writer who changed not just what you thought — but how you looked

Desmond Morris, who has died aged 98, was a zoologist, broadcaster, painter, public........

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