The goliath tigerfish makes its home in the Congo River system in Africa. The toothy, scary-looking creature looks more myth than reality and seems fit for the movie screen. The goliath tigerfish is considered Africa’s equivalent of the South American piranha.
Sawfish feed on fish and invertebrates that are detected and captured with the use of their saw. They are generally harmless to humans, but can inflict serious injuries when captured and defending themselves with the saw.
Common basilisk is a lizard found in Central and South American rainforests near rivers and streams. It is also known as the Jesus Lizard for its ability to run on the surface of water.
Azulejo is a form of Spanish and Portuguese painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework. Azulejos are found on the interior and exterior of churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, restaurants, bars and even railways or subway stations.
IMCO was an Austrian manufacturer of cigarette lighters. Established in 1907 by Julius Meister, who was formerly a manufacturer of brass buttons for the Austro-Hungarian Army.
"My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan," Gray explains as she opens this complex and rewarding family memoir. That claim gave her mother "both the aristocratic pedigree and the freedom to be a barbarian." Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman was 19 and hungry in 1925 when she left the Soviet Union for France. Tatiana and Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky soon fell passionately in love, but the ever-practical woman married aristocratic Frenchman Bertrand du Plessix instead. They had one child, Francine, before du Plessix was killed in early WWII combat. Tatiana then became involved with Alexander Liberman, a British- and French-educated artistic Jewish-Russian émigré. Alex, Tatiana and Francine fled to New York in 1941 and started a new life—Tatiana designing hats for Bendel's before a career with Saks, Alex scaling the fashion journalism ladder at Condé Nast.
The Isole di Brissago are a group of two islands located in the Swiss part of Lake Maggiore. In the 19th century they were the property of an Anglo-Irishman of the St. Leger family, Richard Fleming, who was married to a Russian-born lady, Antonietta, who developed the gardens at great expense. After the death of her husband, the writer James Joyce visited the island and stayed at her house.
Caroline Blackwood was a writer and artist's muse, and the eldest child of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Caroline Blackwood was equally well-known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers".
Christine Keeler is an English former model and showgirl. Her involvement with a British government minister discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963, in what is known as the Profumo Affair. In July 1961, Ward introduced her to John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War, at a pool party at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion owned by Lord Astor. Profumo entered into an affair with Keeler, not realising that she was also sleeping with drug dealer Johnny Edgecombe as well as Yevgeni Ivanov, a naval attaché at the embassy of the Soviet Union.
Discoveries announced in early 2011 show that Ophiuchi is moving through space at 85,000km/h, having likely been ejected from orbit around a more massive star that was destroyed in its own supernova blast. Due to this high proper motion in combination with high intrinsic brightness and its current location in a dust-rich area of the galaxy, the star is creating a bow-shock in the direction of motion. This shock has been made visible via NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.