Of the 39 officers who signed this silver box in March 1914 (at Verdala Barracks, Malta hence the name) 13 lost their lives during the First World War, seven of them by October of that year …

It can sometimes seem as if there’s a museum for everything. The Pencil Museum gets cited often, but less so the Pen Museum, which is a shame, as Birmingham was a major pen-making industry in the Victorian era …

Charles Darwin (1809 –82) was an enthusiastic beetle collector and, with his friend and cousin William Darwin Fox, rarely attended lectures at Cambridge, preferring to go ‘beetling’ instead …