This is The Guardian.

Hello listeners, it's Miranda Hart here. I am with News.

I have a new book called I haven't been entirely honest with you.

I know. What an intriguing title.

You see, in the last decade, I've had a rather unexpected time with some very

challenging lows, though some surprising joys so there's fun along the way, but I've learned a lot

about living and feeling well, all in the book. My hope is that my story might help your story.

Also, I narrated the audiobook so you can get my lovely voice, and listened to I haven't been

entirely honest with you now, wherever you get your audiobooks.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture,

politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to

the Guardian.com forward slash long read. Teeth as time capsules, Soviet secrets and my dentist

grandmother by Jacob Mikanowski. Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack.

Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusk-like.

The fact that we can grow them, lose them, and grow them again, if only once,

seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish.

Yet few things mark us more intimately as mammals than our teeth.

The development of variable dentition is one of the great trump cards in the arsenal of mammalian

evolution. At our very core, we are a tribe of nibblers, biters, and grinders.

The human dental formula, flat incisors, dainty canines, hardworking molars, is a classic

omnivores compromise, aggression and carnivory in front, industrious vegetarianism in back. Harder than bone, harder than any other part of the

body, they are also where we are most vulnerable. Thomas De Quincey wrote that if toothaches could

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