A beautifully produced guide with a huge number of photographs of larvae and feeding signs, as well as Richard Lewington’s wonderful paintings of the adults at rest.

It covers 1,033 species, with 927 illustrated out of the 1,627 micromoths on the British list. Groups which cannot be reliably distinguished on sight are covered in less detail, and many small or very rare species have been omitted altogether.

Identification starts with a rather complicated key to families (p32). This is actually a group of 17 separate keys, each headed by one or more features characteristic of that group. The idea is that you compare your specimen to each feature-list to find the first that matches, and then follow that key.

Having decided on a family, you can then peruse the paintings in the colour plates section (pp 204-259), handily marked with green in the top right corner of the page so they can be easily found.

In practice I suspect most people will skip the key and go straight to the pictorial guide (p41) but it’s important to then read the species account as not all portrayed differences are significant. Some groups cannot be reliably distinguished without examining the genitalia - or even then.

The species accounts include fore-wing length, a brief description of the colour pattern, life-history, foodplant, habits and habitat. There is a UK and Ireland distribution map for each species.