It covers the history of these topics from the 19th century onwards, describing the discoveries of Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Fritz Müller, especially their studies of butterflies in the Amazon.

The book looks at the history of camouflage and mimicry, starting with the travels of Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazon, looking at butterflies and, like Charles Darwin, reasoning about the struggle for existence implied by such a profusion of life.

An extreme case that Forbes celebrates is the bird-dropping spider, which wonderfully if not precisely attractively mimics bird excrement on a leaf, using its body and a film of cobweb.

Forbes tells how the book got Cott the job of camouflage instructor to the British Eighth Army in Egypt, in a unit which created large-scale decoys including a dummy railhead and which successfully concealed a whole armoured division in the open desert in a deception operation for the battle of El Alamein.

He describes how Miriam Rothschild took time away from her major study of fleas to investigate the toxic chemicals that underlie aposematism (warning coloration) and hence mimicry, showing that monarch butterflies contained cardenolides similar to the heart drug digoxin.

A generation later, a pioneer of evolutionary developmental biology, Sean B. Carroll, investigated the way that interacting genes such as distal-less (dll) control the development of butterfly wing patterns.

"[7] All the same, the principles identified by Hugh Bamford Cott "did become the basis for subsequent military camouflage, starting with successes improvised in the North African desert campaigns with palm fronds and jerry cans.

[10] The evolutionary biologist Edmund D. Brodie III, in BioScience, notes that the brilliantly coloured coral snakes, boldly striped in red, yellow, and black, are "among the most beautiful and breathtaking of reptiles",[11] and argues that anyone who has seen one would agree with Hugh Cott that Abbot Thayer's claim that "such a beast is camouflaged borders on the ludicrous.

"[12] The lepidopterist Peter Eeles, in Dispar, notes that Forbes has a "dazzling cast" of characters to people his book, including "Roosevelt, Picasso, Nabokov, Churchill, and Darwin himself, to name a few.

For a lepidopterist, the highlights were the stories of Bates, Wallace, and Müller exploring the Amazon and noting the Heliconiid butterflies with their complex patterns of mimicry; and the African swallowtail Papilio dardanus with its unique range of morphs controlled by no less than 11 alleles of the engrailed.