Virgin Queens loom large as inspirational icons of both endeavours but Ralegh's substantive commitment in financial and political terms was to the earlier Virginia project, with the Guiana episode appearing as a hastily conceived attempt to re-run the Virginia enterprise.

Today, fetishism in all its forms - bondage, piercing, rubberism, mummification, asphyxiation, infantilism etc - is stigmatised as a socially unacceptable form of behaviour, even though there is a great deal of curiosity surrounding its practice.

Dimorpheous minerals like bellidoite and berzelianite are as much indistinguishable like intergrowths of the minerals berzelianite, mgriite and lollingite using backscattered and secondary electron images. Optical microscopy is the key to overcome these problems.

"You want names, I'll give you names. My name is Leonard Alfred Schneider. What was I doing when I took the name Lenny Bruce? I was moving towards the invisible middle.