LAST month, during a walking tour of Béthune in northern France, our guide recalled the work of a Cork woman, Kate McCarthy, who nursed wounded soldiers during both world wars. Her niece, Sr Breda McCarthy of the Loreto Convent in Bray, told me this extraordinary woman’s story.

JARED Diamond, in his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, compared chimp biology with our own. Sharing 98.4% of their DNA with humans, chimps are more closely related to us than they are to the other great apes.

ARRAS, in the Pas-de-Calais, has the rat as its symbol. Grain stored there in medieval times attracted the rodents and, perhaps, ‘un rat’ was a pun on the city’s name.

SOME creatures have massive public profiles; elephants, big cats and pandas come to mind.

The whitethroats numbers have been affected by climate change in its winter home in the Sahel.

THE kiwi, New Zealand’s national bird, is the weirdest feathered creature on earth.

FOTA Wildlife Park is famous for its cheetahs; hundreds of cubs have been born there.

THE Old Man of Hoy, in Orkney, is a spectacular sight. This vertical pillar, rising from the sea, 60m out from a sheer cliff-face, is 137 metres high and about 30m thick.

WHO, on mature reflection, would opt to live forever? All might be well, at first, in eternal life but ultimately, tedium boredom and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune would render existence unbearable.

WILLIAM Shakespeare was born four and a half centuries ago this year; he was baptised on April 26, 1564.