When you draw up a list of famous frogs in the history of the planet, it turns out to be pretty short. There's the one who was only doing time as a frog, and there's the one who was nothing more than a small felt glove puppet who went into show-business and hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities in the Seventies. And neither was a frog in the true sense of the word. (Doubtless in the frog world there are only a couple of famous humans, and probably one was really a frog condemned to live in the body of a prince, while the other was just a happy-go-lucky hand-operated puppet that became a celebrity by hanging out with the top frogs in the entertainment industry. But there's no way of checking on that.)

LRB 4 August 1994 | PDF Download