RICHARD the Third, according to Shakespeare, was “not shaped for courtly tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass”.

WORLD Wildlife Fund president for Spain, King Juan Carlos, was ‘outed’ early last year for hunting elephants in Botswana.

KARL Marx, who died of a chest complaint in 1883, was buried on St Patrick’s Day at Highgate Cemetery in North London.

IN 1950s Limerick, we turned over stones at low tide in the bed of the Shannon to catch eel-fry wriggling underneath.

IN Claxton, Georgia, USA, the annual rattlesnake roundup is being transformed into a “rattlesnake and wildlife festival”.

AT Dublin District Court, last week, a petrol station owner admitted to removing a gull’s nest and three eggs from the roof of his premises in Balbriggan.

IN 1961 Nelle Harper Lee, ‘the Jane Austen of Southern Alabama’, won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

COAL tits are visiting my garden.

IN April 2006, a businessman shot a strange animal on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, having paid $45,000 for the privilege of doing so.

THOMAS BEWICK, the celebrated engraver, carved in hard woods.