title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida provides over 9,200 students with housing in residence halls and complexes on the eastern and western sides of campus. Facilities vary in the cost of rent and privacy. Housing plans also offer students access to dining facilities. The university also provides housing to a number of graduate students and their families. , the university is building a new residence hall on campus that will be more accessible to students with disabilities.


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida's Department of Recreational Sports (RecSports) includes operation of two lake-front parks at Lake Wauburg, group fitness, personal and small group training, massage therapy, intramural sports, 51 competitive sports clubs, two world-class indoor fitness and recreation facilities, four campus pools, outdoor rock climbing, an adventure travel recreation program, campus fields and facilities, a skate park and staff development services for over 700 students who are employed by the department's programs.


title: University of Florida

text: RecSports manages the University of Florida Southwest Recreation Center, a state-of-the-art facility with six indoor basketball courts, a split-level cardio room, personal training studio, massage therapy rooms, strength and conditioning area and a social lounge with a smoothie bar. Other campus facilities operated by RecSports include the Student Recreation & Fitness Center.


title: University of Florida

text: Outside of RecSports, campus recreation options include an arts and crafts center, bowling alley and game room—all in the J. Wayne Reitz Union, and the Mark Bostick Golf Course.


title: University of Florida

text: The campus also contains nature trails, open spaces, small ponds, picnic areas, shady nooks and an wildlife sanctuary.


title: University of Florida

text: The UF Scientific Diver Development Program provides SCUBA training for students interested in pursuing a career involving underwater research.


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida Student Government is the governing body of students who attend the University of Florida, representing the university's nearly 50,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students. The university's student government operates on a yearly $22.1 million budget (2020-2021 fiscal year), one of the largest student government budgets in the United States, and the money is allocated by the Budget and Appropriations Committee of the Student Senate. The student government was established in 1909 and consists of executive, judicial and unicameral legislative branches.


title: University of Florida

text: The university campus is served by nine bus routes of the Gainesville Regional Transit System (RTS). Students, faculty, and staff with university-issued ID cards are able to use the system for no additional fee. RTS also provides other campus services, including Gator Aider (during football games), S.N.A.P, and Later Gator nighttime service.


title: University of Florida

text: The Gainesville region and the university are served by the Gainesville Regional Airport, which is in northeast Gainesville and has daily flights to Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte.


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida community includes six major student-run media outlets and companion Web sites.


title: University of Florida

text: Various other journals and magazines are published by the university's academic units and student groups, including the Bob Graham Center-affiliated Florida Political Review and the literary journal "Subtropics".


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida Career Resource Center is in the Reitz Student Union. Its mission is to assist students and alumni who are seeking career development, career experiences, and employment opportunities. These services involve on and off-campus job interviews, career planning, assistance in applying to graduate and professional schools, and internship and co-op placements. The Career Resource Center offers workshops, information sessions, career fairs, and advisement on future career options. Staff also counsel students and alumni regarding resumes and portfolios, interviewing tactics, cover letters, job strategies and other potential leads for finding employment in the corporate, academic and government sectors.


title: University of Florida

text: The Princeton Review ranked the Career Resource Center as the best among 368 ranked universities in career and job placement services in 2010, and fourth overall in 2011.


title: University of Florida

text: The Florida Museum of Natural History, established in 1891, is one of the country's oldest natural history museums and was officially chartered by the state of Florida. This facility is dedicated to understanding, preserving and interpreting biological diversity and cultural heritage. In over 100 years of operations, the Florida Museum of Natural History has been housed in several buildings, from the Seagle Building to facilities at Dickinson Hall, Powell Hall, and the Randell Research Center. In 2000 the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity was opened after a generous donation from University of Florida benefactors. The McGuire Center houses a collection of more than six million butterfly and moth specimens, making it one of the largest collections of Lepidoptera in the world, rivaling the Natural History Museum in London, England.


title: University of Florida

text: The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, established in 1990, is also at the University of Florida on the southwest part of campus. This facility is one of the largest university art museums in the South, the Harn has more than 7,000 works in its permanent collection and an array of temporary exhibitions. The museum's permanent collections focus on Asian, African, modern and contemporary art, as well as photography. The university sponsors educational programs at the museum including films, lectures, interactive activities, and school and family offerings. In October 2005 the Harn expanded by more than with the opening of the Mary Ann Harn Cofrin Pavilion, which includes new educational and meeting areas and the Camellia Court Cafe, the first eatery for visitors of the Cultural Plaza.


title: University of Florida

text: Performing arts venues at the University of Florida include the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, the University Auditorium, Constans Theatre, the Baughman Center, and performances at the O'Connell Center. The mission is to provide an unparalleled experience where performing artists create and share knowledge to serve the student body, faculty, and staff at the university; Gainesville residents; and visitors to North Central Florida.


title: University of Florida

text: The University Auditorium was founded in the mid-1920s and is home to the Anderson Memorial Organ. The auditorium has a concert stage and can seat up to 843 patrons. The venue is suitable for musical concerts, special lectures, convocations, dance concerts, and pageants.


title: University of Florida

text: The Phillips Center for the Performing Arts was founded in 1992 and is a performing arts theatre. The Phillips Center is on the western side of campus, and hosts established and emerging national and international artists on the main stage, as well as the annual Miss University of Florida pageant and performances by the University of Florida's original student-run dance company, Floridance. The Phillips Center consists of a 1,700-seat proscenium hall and the 200-seat Squitieri Studio Theatre.


title: University of Florida

text: Constans Theatre was founded in 1967 and is a performing arts venue next to the J. Wayne Reitz Union. Constans Theatre serves as a venue for musical concerts, theater, dance, and lectures, and is a sub-venue of the Nadine McGuire Pavilion and Dance Pavilion.


title: University of Florida

text: The Baughman Center was founded in 2000 and serves as a venue for small musical and performing arts events. The facility consists of two buildings next to Lake Alice on the western portion of campus. The main building is a pavilion, the other is a administrative building. The Baughman Center can accommodate up to 96 patrons.


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida has been portrayed in several books, movies and television shows. In addition, the University of Florida campus has been the backdrop for a number of different books and movies.


title: University of Florida

text: Robert Cade, a professor in the university's College of Medicine, was the leader of the research team that invented the sports drink Gatorade as a hydration supplement for the Florida Gators football team in 1965–66.


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida's intercollegiate sports teams, known as the "Florida Gators," compete in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Gators compete in nine men's sports and twelve women's sports.


title: University of Florida

text: For the 2014–15 school year, the University Athletic Association budgeted more $100 million for its sports teams and facilities. Since 1987–88, the Gators have won twenty-three of the last twenty-six SEC All-Sports Trophies, recognizing Florida as the best overall athletics program in the SEC. Florida is the only program in the nation to finish among the nation's top ten in each of the last thirty national all-sports standings and is the only SEC school to place 100 or more student-athletes on the Academic Honor Roll each of the last fifteen years.


title: University of Florida

text: The Florida Gators have won thirty-five national team championships, thirty of which are NCAA championships. Florida Gators athletes have also won 267 NCAA championships in individual sports events. Florida is one of only two Division I FBS universities to win multiple national championships in each of the two most popular NCAA sports: football (1996, 2006, 2008) and men's basketball (2006, 2007).


title: University of Florida

text: The University of Florida fielded its first official varsity football team in the fall of 1906, when the university held its first classes on its new Gainesville campus. Since then, the Florida Gators football team has played in 40 bowl games, won three consensus national championships and eight Southeastern Conference (SEC) championships, produced 89 first-team All-Americans, 45 National Football League (NFL) first-round draft choices, and three Heisman Trophy winners.


title: University of Florida

text: The Gators won their first post-season game on January 1, 1953, beating Tulsa 14–13 in Jacksonville, Florida. The Gators' first major bowl win was the 1967 Orange Bowl in which coach Ray Graves and Heisman Trophy quarterback Steve Spurrier led the Gators to a 27–12 victory over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.


title: University of Florida

text: In 1990, Spurrier returned to his alma mater as its new head coach, and spurred the Gators to their first six official SEC football championships. The Gators, quarterbacked by their second Heisman Trophy winner, Danny Wuerffel, won their first national championship in 1996 with a 52–20 victory over Florida State Seminoles in the Sugar Bowl. In 2006, Urban Meyer coached the Gators to a 13–1 record, capturing their seventh SEC Championship, and defeating the top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes 41–14 for the BCS National Championship. In 2008, the Gators' third Heisman-winning quarterback, Tim Tebow, led them in a 24–14 BCS Championship Game victory over the Oklahoma Sooners for the team's third national championship.


title: University of Florida

text: Since 1930, the Gators' home field has been Florida Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which seats 88,548 fans. The stadium is popularly known as "The Swamp."


title: University of Florida

text: Center Neal Walk is the only Gator to have had his number retired by the basketball team. The Florida Gators men's basketball team has also gained national recognition over the past 20 years. The Gators went to the Final Four of the 1994 NCAA tournament under coach Lon Kruger, and coach Billy Donovan led the Gators back to the NCAA Final Four in 2000, losing to the Michigan State Spartans in the final. Under Donovan, the Gators won their first Southeastern Conference (SEC) tournament championship in 2005, beating the Kentucky Wildcats. After repeating as SEC tournament champions in 2006, the Gators won their first basketball national championship, defeating the UCLA Bruins 73–57 in the final game of the NCAA basketball tournament.


title: University of Florida

text: The Gators beat the Arkansas Razorbacks 77–56 to win their third consecutive SEC tournament title in 2007. Florida defeated Ohio State 84–75 to again win the NCAA basketball tournament championship.


title: University of Florida

text: The Gators play their home games in the Exactech Arena at the Stephen C. O'Connell Center. The 10,133-seat multi-purpose indoor arena was completed in 1980 and underwent massive renovations during the 2016–17 season. The arena is popularly known as the "O'Dome."


title: University of Florida

text: Since 1968, 163 Gator athletes and 13 Florida coaches have represented 37 countries in the Olympic Games, winning 50 Olympic gold medals, 28 silver medals and 30 bronze medals through the 2012 Summer Olympics. The list of University of Florida alumni who are Olympic gold medalists includes Brad Wilkerson (baseball); Delisha Milton-Jones (basketball); Steve Mesler (bobsled); Heather Mitts and Abby Wambach (soccer); Theresa Andrews, Catie Ball, Tracy Caulkins, Matt Cetlinski, Conor Dwyer, Geoff Gaberino, Nicole Haislett, Mike Heath, David Larson, Ryan Lochte, Anthony Nesty, Dara Torres, Mary Wayte and Martin Zubero (swimming); and Kerron Clement, Dennis Mitchell, Frank Shorter, Christian Taylor and Bernard Williams (track and field).


title: University of Florida

text: As of August 2018 the University of Florida has 545,165 alumni. Over 57,000 are dues-paying members of the University of Florida Alumni Association. Florida alumni live in every state and more than 100 foreign countries. Florida alumni include two Nobel Prize winners, nine NASA astronauts, ten U.S. Senators, forty-two U.S. Representatives, eight U.S. ambassadors, eleven state governors, eleven state Supreme Court justices, and over fifty federal court judges. Florida graduates have served as the executive leaders of such diverse institutions as the U.S. Marine Corps and the National Organization for Women.


title: University of Florida

text: Awards won by University of Florida faculty members include a Fields Medal and an Abel Prize in Mathematics, Albert Einstein Medal, Dirac Medal, Sakurai Prize, Frank Isakson Prize, Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials and a few Special Breakthrough Prizes for collaborators who made important contributions for the success LIGO's discovery of gravitational wave in Physics, numerous Pulitzer Prizes, and NASA's top award for research, and the Smithsonian Institution's conservation award. There are more than sixty eminent scholar endowed faculty chairs, and more than fifty faculty elections to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, or Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine or a counterpart in a foreign nation. More than two dozen faculty are members of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine or counterpart in a foreign nation.


title: Antelope

text: The term antelope is used to refer to many species of even-toed ruminant that are indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope comprise a wastebasket taxon defined as any of numerous Old World grazing and browsing hoofed mammals belonging to the family Bovidae of the order Artiodactyla.


title: Antelope

text: A stricter definition, also known as the "true antelopes," includes only the genera "Gazella", "Nanger", "Eudorcas" and "Antilope". One North American species, the pronghorn, is colloquially referred to as the "American antelope," but it belongs to a different family from the African and Eurasian antelopes.


title: Antelope

text: A group of antelope is called a herd. Unlike deer antlers, which are shed and grown annually, antelope horns grow continuously.


title: Antelope

text: The English word "antelope" first appeared in 1417 and is derived from the Old French "antelop", itself derived from Medieval Latin "ant(h)alopus", which in turn comes from the Byzantine Greek word ἀνθόλοψ, "anthólops", first attested in Eustathius of Antioch (), according to whom it was a fabulous animal "haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch and having long, saw-like horns capable of cutting down trees". It perhaps derives from Greek ἀνθος, "anthos" (flower) and ώψ, "ops" (eye), perhaps meaning "beautiful eye" or alluding to the animals' long eyelashes. This, however, may be a folk etymology in Greek based on some earlier root. The word "talopus" and "calopus", from Latin, came to be used in heraldry. In 1607, it was first used for living, cervine animals .


title: Antelope

text: The 91 antelope species, most of which are native to Africa, occur in about 30 genera. The classification of tribes or subfamilies within Bovidae is still a matter of debate, with several alternative systems proposed.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope are not a cladistic or taxonomically defined group. The term is used to describe all members of the family Bovidae that do not fall under the category of sheep, cattle, or goats. Usually, all species of the Antilopinae, Hippotraginae, Reduncinae, Cephalophinae, many Bovinae, the grey rhebok, and the impala are called antelope.


title: Antelope

text: More species of antelope are native to Africa than to any other continent, almost exclusively in savannahs, with 25-40 species co-occurring over much of East Africa. Because savannah habitat in Africa has expanded and contracted five times over the last three million years, and the fossil record indicates this is when most extant species evolved, it is believed that isolation in refugia during contractions was a major driver of this diversification. Other species occur in Asia: the Arabian Peninsula is home to the Arabian oryx and Dorcas gazelle. India is home to the nilgai, chinkara, blackbuck, Tibetan antelope, and four-horned antelope, while Russia and Central Asia have the Tibetan antelope and saiga.


title: Antelope

text: No antelope species is native to Australasia or Antarctica, nor do any extant species occur in the Americas, though the nominate saiga subspecies occurred in North America during the Pleistocene. North America is currently home to the native pronghorn, which taxonomists do not consider a member of the antelope group, but which is often locally referred to as such (e.g., "American antelope"). In Europe, several extinct species occur in the fossil record, and the saiga was found widely during the Pleistocene but did not persist into the later Holocene, except in Russian Kalmykia and Astrakhan Oblast.


title: Antelope

text: Many species of antelope have been imported to other parts of the world, especially the United States, for exotic game hunting. With some species possessing spectacular leaping and evasive skills, individuals may escape. Texas in particular has many game ranches, as well as habitats and climates that are very hospitable to African and Asian plains antelope species. Accordingly, wild populations of blackbuck antelope, gemsbok, and nilgai may be found in Texas.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope live in a wide range of habitats. Most live in the African savannahs. However, many species are more secluded, such as the forest antelope, as well as the extreme cold-living saiga, the desert-adapted Arabian oryx, the rocky koppie-living klipspringer, and semiaquatic sitatunga.


title: Antelope

text: Species living in forests, woodland, or bush tend to be sedentary, but many of the plains species undertake long migrations. These enable grass-eating species to follow the rains and thereby their food supply. The gnus and gazelles of East Africa perform some of the most impressive mass migratory circuits of all mammals.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope vary greatly in size. For example, a male common eland can measure at the shoulder and weigh almost , whereas an adult royal antelope may stand only at the shoulder and weigh a mere .


title: Antelope

text: Not surprisingly for animals with long, slender yet powerful legs, many antelope have long strides and can run fast. Some (e.g. klipspringer) are also adapted to inhabiting rock koppies and crags. Both dibatags and gerenuks habitually stand on their two hind legs to reach acacia and other tree foliage. Different antelope have different body types, which can affect movement. Duikers are short, bush-dwelling antelope that can pick through dense foliage and dive into the shadows rapidly. Gazelle and springbok are known for their speed and leaping abilities. Even larger antelope, such as nilgai, elands, and kudus, are capable of jumping or greater, although their running speed is restricted by their greater mass.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope have a wide variety of coverings, though most have a dense coat of short fur. In most species, the coat (pelage) is some variation of a brown colour (or several shades of brown), often with white or pale underbodies. Exceptions include the zebra-marked zebra duiker, the grey, black, and white Jentink's duiker, and the black lechwe. Most of the "spiral-horned" antelope have pale, vertical stripes on their backs. Many desert and semidesert species are particularly pale, some almost silvery or whitish (e.g. Arabian oryx); the beisa and southern oryxes have gray and black pelages with vivid black-and-white faces. Common features of various gazelles are white rumps, which flash a warning to others when they run from danger, and dark stripes midbody (the latter feature is also shared by the springbok and beira). The springbok also has a pouch of white, brushlike hairs running along its back, which opens up when the animal senses danger, causing the dorsal hairs to stand on end.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope are ruminants, so have well-developed molar teeth, which grind cud (food balls stored in the stomach) into a pulp for further digestion. They have no upper incisors, but rather a hard upper gum pad, against which their lower incisors bite to tear grass stems and leaves.


title: Antelope

text: Like many other herbivores, antelope rely on keen senses to avoid predators. Their eyes are placed on the sides of their heads, giving them a broad radius of vision with minimal binocular vision. Their horizontally elongated pupils also help in this respect. Acute senses of smell and hearing give antelope the ability to perceive danger at night out in the open (when predators are often on the prowl). These same senses play an important role in contact between individuals of the same species; markings on their heads, ears, legs, and rumps are used in such communication. Many species "flash" such markings, as well as their tails; vocal communications include loud barks, whistles, "moos", and trumpeting; many species also use scent marking to define their territories or simply to maintain contact with their relatives and neighbors.


title: Antelope

text: Many antelope are sexually dimorphic. In most species, both sexes have horns, but those of males tend to be larger. Males tend to be larger than the females, but exceptions in which the females tend to be heavier than the males include the bush duiker, dwarf antelope, Cape grysbok, and oribi, all rather small species. A number of species have hornless females (e.g., sitatunga, red lechwe, and suni). In some species, the males and females have differently coloured pelages (e.g. blackbuck and nyala).


title: Antelope

text: The size and shape of antelope horns varies greatly. Those of the duikers and dwarf antelope tend to be simple "spikes", but differ in the angle to the head from backward curved and backward pointing (e.g. yellow-backed duiker) to straight and upright (e.g. steenbok). Other groups have twisted (e.g. common eland), spiral (e.g. greater kudu), "recurved" (e.g. the reedbucks), lyrate (e.g. impala), or long, curved (e.g. the oryxes) horns. Horns are not shed and their bony cores are covered with a thick, persistent sheath of horny material, both of which distinguish them from antlers.


title: Antelope

text: Horns are efficient weapons, and tend to be better developed in those species where males fight over females (large herd antelope) than in solitary or lekking species. With male-male competition for mates, horns are clashed in combat. Males more commonly use their horns against each other than against another species. The boss of the horns is typically arranged in such a way that two antelope striking at each other's horns cannot crack each other's skulls, making a fight via horn more ritualized than dangerous. Many species have ridges in their horns for at least two-thirds the length of their horns, but these ridges are not a direct indicator of age.


title: Antelope

text: Small antelope, such as dik-diks, tend to be monogamous. They live in a forest environment with patchy resources, and a male is unable to monopolize more than one female due to this sparse distribution. Larger forest species often form very small herds of two to four females and one male.


title: Antelope

text: Some species, such as lechwes, pursue a lek breeding system, where the males gather on a lekking ground and compete for a small territory, while the females appraise males and choose one with which to mate.


title: Antelope

text: Large grazing antelope, such as impala or wildebeest, form large herds made up of many females and a single breeding male, which excludes all other males, often by combat.


title: Antelope

text: Large antelope that gather in large herds, such as wildebeest, rely on numbers and running speed for protection. In some species, adults will encircle the offspring, protecting them from predators when threatened. Many forest antelope rely on cryptic coloring and good hearing to avoid predators. Forest antelope often have very large ears and dark or striped colorations. Small antelope, especially duikers, evade predation by jumping into dense bush where the predator cannot pursue. Springboks use a behavior known as stotting to confuse predators.


title: Antelope

text: Open grassland species have nowhere to hide from predators, so they tend to be fast runners. They are agile and have good endurance—these are advantages when pursued by sprint-dependent predators such as cheetahs, which are the fastest of land animals, but tire quickly. Reaction distances vary with predator species and behaviour. For example, gazelles may not flee from a lion until it is closer than 200 m (650 ft)—lions hunt as a pride or by surprise, usually by stalking; one that can be seen clearly is unlikely to attack. However, sprint-dependent cheetahs will cause gazelles to flee at a range of over .


title: Antelope

text: If escape is not an option, antelope are capable of fighting back. Oryxes in particular have been known to stand sideways like many unrelated bovids to appear larger than they are, and may charge at a predator as a last resort.


title: Antelope

text: About 25 species are rated by the IUCN as endangered, such as the dama gazelle and mountain nyala. A number of subspecies are also endangered, including the giant sable antelope and the mhorr gazelle. The main causes for concern for these species are habitat loss, competition with cattle for grazing, and trophy hunting.


title: Antelope

text: The chiru or Tibetan antelope is hunted for its pelt, which is used in making "shahtoosh" wool, used in shawls. Since the fur can only be removed from dead animals, and each animal yields very little of the downy fur, several antelope must be killed to make a single shawl. This unsustainable demand has led to enormous declines in the chiru population.


title: Antelope

text: The saiga is hunted for its horns, which are considered an aphrodisiac by some cultures. Only the males have horns, and have been so heavily hunted that some herds contain up to 800 females to one male. The species has shown a steep decline and is critically endangered.


title: Antelope

text: It is difficult to determine how long antelope live in the wild. With the preference of predators towards old and infirm individuals, which can no longer sustain peak speeds, few wild prey-animals live as long as their biological potential. In captivity, wildebeest have lived beyond 20 years old, and impalas have reached their late teens.


title: Antelope

text: The antelope's horn is prized for supposed medicinal and magical powers in many places. The horn of the male saiga, in Eastern practice, is ground as an aphrodisiac, for which it has been hunted nearly to extinction. In the Congo, it is thought to confine spirits. The antelope's ability to run swiftly has also led to their association with the wind, such as in the "Rig Veda", as the steeds of the Maruts and the wind god Vayu. There is, however, no scientific evidence that the horns of any antelope have any change on a human's physiology or characteristics.


title: Antelope

text: Humans have also used the term "Antelope" to refer to a tradition usually found in the sport of track and field.


title: Antelope

text: Domestication of animals requires certain traits in the animal that antelope do not typically display. Most species are difficult to contain in any density, due to the territoriality of the males, or in the case of oryxes (which have a relatively hierarchical social structure), an aggressive disposition; they can easily kill a human. Because many have extremely good jumping abilities, providing adequate fencing is a challenge. Also, antelope will consistently display a fear response to perceived predators, such as humans, making them very difficult to herd or handle. Although antelope have diets and rapid growth rates highly suitable for domestication, this tendency to panic and their nonhierarchical social structure explains why farm-raised antelope are uncommon. Ancient Egyptians kept herds of gazelles and addax for meat, and occasionally pets. It is unknown whether they were truly domesticated, but it seems unlikely, as no domesticated gazelles exist today.


title: Antelope

text: However, humans have had success taming certain species, such as the elands. These antelope sometimes jump over each other's backs when alarmed, but this incongruous talent seems to be exploited only by wild members of the species; tame elands do not take advantage of it and can be enclosed within a very low fence. Their meat, milk, and hides are all of excellent quality, and experimental eland husbandry has been going on for some years in both Ukraine and Zimbabwe. In both locations, the animal has proved wholly amenable to domestication. Similarly, European visitors to Arabia reported "tame gazelles are very common in the Asiatic countries of which the species is a native; and the poetry of these countries abounds in allusions both to the beauty and the gentleness of the gazelle." Other antelope that have been tamed successfully include the gemsbok, the kudu, and the springbok. Nor are the characteristics described above necessarily barriers to domestication; for further information, see animal domestication.


title: Antelope

text: A wide variety of antelope hybrids have been recorded in zoos, game parks, and wildlife ranches, due to either a lack of more appropriate mates in enclosures shared with other species or a misidentification of species. The ease of hybridization shows how closely related some antelope species are. With few exceptions, most hybrid antelope occur only in captivity.


title: Antelope

text: Most hybrids occur between species within the same genus. All reported examples occur within the same subfamily. As with most mammal hybrids, the less closely related the parents, the more likely the offspring will be sterile.


title: Antelope

text: Antelope are a common symbol in heraldry, though they occur in a highly distorted form from nature. The heraldic antelope has the body of a stag and the tail of a lion, with serrated horns, and a small tusk at the end of its snout. This bizarre and inaccurate form was invented by European heralds in the Middle Ages, who knew little of foreign animals and made up the rest. The antelope was mistakenly imagined to be a monstrous beast of prey; the 16th century poet Edmund Spenser referred to it as being "as fierce and fell as a wolf."


title: Antelope

text: Antelope can all also occur in their natural form, in which case they are termed "natural antelope" to distinguish them from the more usual heraldic antelope. The arms previously used by the Republic of South Africa featured a natural antelope, along with an oryx.


title: Green anaconda

text: The green anaconda (Eunectes murinus), also known as the giant Emerald anaconda, common anaconda, common water boa or sucuri, is a boa species found in South America. It is the heaviest and one of the longest known extant snake species. Like all boas, it is a non-venomous constrictor.


title: Green anaconda

text: The term "anaconda" often refers to this species, though the term could also apply to other members of the genus "Eunectes". Fossils of the snake date back to the Late Pleistocene in the Gruta do Urso locality.


title: Green anaconda

text: The green anaconda's specific name is derived from the Latin "", meaning 'of mice', for being thought to prey on mice.


title: Green anaconda

text: The green anaconda is the world's heaviest and one of the world's longest snakes, reaching a length of up to long. More typical mature specimens reportedly can range up to , with adult females, with a mean length of about , being generally much larger than the males, which average around . Weights are less well studied, though reportedly range from in a typical adult. It is the largest snake native to the Americas. Although it is slightly shorter than the reticulated python, it is far bulkier; the bulk of a green anaconda is comparable to that of a reticulated python. Reports of anacondas or even longer also exist, but such claims must be regarded with caution, as no specimens of such lengths have ever been deposited in a museum and hard evidence is lacking. A US$50,000 cash reward is on offer for anyone who can catch an anaconda or longer. The longest and heaviest verified specimen encountered by Dr. Jesús Antonio Rivas, who had examined more than a thousand anacondas, was a female long and weighing .


title: Green anaconda

text: The color pattern consists of an olive green background overlaid with black blotches along the length of the body. The head is narrow compared to the body, usually with distinctive orange-yellow striping on either side. The eyes are set high on the head, allowing the snake to see out of the water while swimming without exposing its body. The anaconda's jaw bones splay open at the front because they are loosely connected. This allows it to swallow prey larger than the size of its head. The windpipe in its mouth allows it to breathe while swallowing its prey. Its largest organ is the liver. The digestion process takes many days to complete and during this time the anaconda behaves very sluggishly.


title: Green anaconda

text: The remote location of the snake's habitat has historically made locating, capturing, and returning specimens difficult. Transporting very large specimens to museums, especially before substantial decay, is difficult (though this has not prevented the return of much larger and more cumbersome crocodilian specimens). Skins can stretch substantially, increasing the snake's size by more than 50% if stretched during the tanning process. Reports without physical proof are considered dubious if from non-scientists, as such individuals may at worst be more interested in promoting themselves or telling a good tale, or at the least may not be sufficiently trained in proper measurement methods. Observational reports of animals which were not captured are even more dubious, as even trained scientists often substantially overestimate the size of anacondas prior to capture. According to the "Guinness Book of World Records", this species has been perhaps subject to the most extreme size exaggerations of any living animal.


title: Green anaconda

text: Numerous historical accounts of green anacondas are reported, often of improbable sizes. Several zoologists (notably Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, among others) note rumors of snakes beyond long, but in each case, their direct observations were limited to snakes around in length. Numerous estimates and second-hand accounts abound, but are generally considered unreliable. To prove the point of overestimating, in Guyana in 1937, zoologist Alpheus Hyatt Verrill asked the expedition team he was with to estimate the length of a large, curled-up anaconda on a rock. The team's guesses ran from ; when measured, this specimen was found to be .


title: Green anaconda

text: Almost all specimens in excess of , including a much-publicized specimen allegedly long, have no voucher specimens including skins or bones.


title: Green anaconda

text: The skin of one specimen, stretched to , has been preserved in the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo and is reported to have come from an anaconda of in length.


title: Green anaconda

text: While in Colombia in 1978, herpetologist William W. Lamar had an encounter with a large female specimen long, estimated to weigh between .


title: Green anaconda

text: One female, reportedly measuring in length, shot in 1963 in Nariva Swamp, Trinidad, contained a caiman. A specimen of , reportedly with a weight of , was caught at the mouth of the Kassikaityu River in Guyana, having been restrained by 13 local men, and was later air-lifted for a zoo collection in the United States, but died in ill health shortly thereafter.


title: Green anaconda

text: The largest size verified for "E. murinus" in captivity was for a specimen kept in Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium, which grew to a length of by the time she died on July 20, 1960. When this specimen was long, she weighed . The estimated weight for an anaconda in the range of would be at least .


title: Green anaconda

text: "National Geographic" has published a weight up to for "E. murinus", but this is almost certainly a mere estimation.


title: Green anaconda

text: Weight can vary considerably in large specimens depending on environmental conditions and recent feedings, with Verrill's aforementioned specimen, having been extremely bulky, scaled at , whereas another specimen considered large at , weighed only .


title: Green anaconda

text: Size presents challenges to attain breeding condition in larger female anacondas. While larger sizes provide the benefit of a larger number of offspring per clutch, the breeding frequency of the individuals reduces with size, indicating that a point exists at which the advantage of a larger clutch size is negated by the female no longer being able to breed. For the anaconda, this limit was estimated at in total length. This is consistent with the results of a revision of the size at maturity and maximum size of several snakes from North America, which found that the maximum size is between 1.5 and 2.5 times the size at maturity. The minimum size of breeding anacondas in a survey of 780 individuals was in snout–vent length, indicating that maximum size attained by anacondas following this pattern would be in snout–vent length. However, most anacondas are captured from the llanos, which is more accessible to humans and has smaller prey available, while the rainforest, which is much less explored and has more plentiful large prey, may be home to larger snakes.


title: Green anaconda

text: In the famous "10th edition of Systema Naturae" of 1758, Carl Linnaeus cited descriptions by Albertus Seba and by Laurens Theodorus Gronovius to erect the distinct species "murina" of his new genus "Boa", which contained eight other species, including "Boa constrictor". The generic name "Boa" came from an ancient Latin word for a type of large snake. The first specimens of "Boa murina" were of immature individuals from in length. In 1830, Johann Georg Wagler erected the separate genus "Eunectes" for Linnaeus's "Boa murina" after more and larger specimens were known and described. Because of the masculine gender of "Eunectes", the feminine Latin specific name "murina" was changed to "murinus".


title: Green anaconda

text: Linnaeus almost certainly chose the scientific name "Boa murina" based on the original Latin description given by Albertus Seba in 1735: ""Serpens testudinea americana, murium insidiator"" [tortoise-patterned (spotted) American snake, a predator that lies in wait for mice (and rats)]. The Latin adjective "murinus" ("murina") in this case would mean "of mice" or "connected with mice", understood in context as "preying on mice", and not as "mouse-gray-colored" (another possible meaning of Latin "murinus") as now often wrongly indicated for "E. murinus". Early English-language sources, such as George Shaw, referred to the "Boa murina" as the "rat boa" and the "Penny Cyclopaedia" (Vol. 5) entry for boa explained: "The trivial name "murina" was given to it from being said to lie in wait for mice." Linnaeus described the appearance of the "Boa murina" in Latin as "rufus maculis supra rotundatis" [reddish-brown with rounded spots on upper parts] and made no reference to a gray coloration. Early descriptions of the green anaconda by different authors variously referred to the general color like brown, glaucous, green, or gray.


title: Green anaconda

text: "Eunectes murinus" is found in South America east of the Andes, in countries including Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, the island of Trinidad, and as far south as northern Paraguay. The type locality given is "America".


title: Green anaconda

text: Anacondas live in swamps, marshes, and slow-moving streams, mainly in the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and Orinoco basins. They are cumbersome on land, but stealthy and sleek in the water. Their eyes and nasal openings are on top of their heads, allowing them to lie in wait for prey while remaining nearly completely submerged.


title: Green anaconda

text: The primarily nocturnal anacondas tend to spend most of their lives in or around water. They have the potential to reach high speeds when swimming. They tend to float beneath the surface of the water with their snouts above the surface. When prey passes by or stops to drink, the anaconda strikes (without eating or swallowing it) and coils around it with its body. The snake then constricts until it has suffocated the prey.


title: Green anaconda

text: Primarily aquatic, they eat a wide variety of prey, almost anything they can manage to overpower, including fish, amphibians, birds, a variety of mammals, and other reptiles. Particularly large anacondas may consume large prey such as tapirs, deer, peccaries, capybaras, and caimans, but such large meals are not regularly consumed. Juvenile anacondas feed on prey such as small birds and juvenile caiman that are typically 40–70 grams in size. As they develop, their diet becomes increasingly complex. Prey availability varies more in grasslands than in river basins. Green anacondas in both habitats have been found to feed on large prey, usually ranging from 14% to 50% of its own mass. A few examples of their prey include broad-snouted caimans, wattled jacanas, capybaras, red-rumped agoutis, collared peccaries, South American tapirs, red side-necked turtles, and northern pudús. Green anacondas take a high risk by feeding on larger prey, which occasionally lead to serious injuries or even death. Some also feed on carrion and conspecifics, usually inside or around water. Large anacondas can go weeks to months without food after eating a large meal, because of their low metabolism. However, females show increased postpartum feeding rates to recover from their reproductive investment. The green anaconda's eyes and nose are located on the top of the head, allowing the snake to breathe and watch for prey while the vast majority of the body is hidden underwater. Many local stories and legends report the anaconda as a man-eater, but little evidence supports any such activity. They employ constriction to subdue their prey. Cannibalism among green anacondas is also known, most recorded cases involving a larger female consuming a smaller male. While the exact reason for this is not understood, scientists cite several possibilities, including the dramatic sexual dimorphism in the species, and the possibility that a female anaconda requires additional food intake after breeding to sustain the long period of gestation. The nearby male simply provides the opportunistic female a ready source of nutrition.


title: Green anaconda

text: This species is solitary until the mating season, which occurs during the rainy season, and can last for several months, usually from April to May. During this time, males must find females. Typically, female snakes lay down a trail of pheromones for the males to follow, but how the males of this species track a female's scent is still unclear. Another possibility is that the female releases an airborne stimulant. This theory is supported by the observation of females that remain motionless, while many males move towards them from all directions. Male anacondas also frequently flick their tongues to sense chemicals that signal the presence of a female.


title: Green anaconda

text: Many males can often find the same female. This results in odd clusters referred to as "breeding balls", in which up to 12 males wrap around the same female and attempt to copulate. The groups can stay in this position for two to four weeks. This ball acts as a slow-motion wrestling match between the males, each one fighting for the opportunity to mate with the female.


title: Green anaconda

text: During mating, males make use of their spurs to arouse the female. They aggressively press their cloacal regions hard against the female body, while continuously scratching her with their spurs. This can produce a scratching sound. Mating approaches its climax when the stimulus of the males' spurs induces the female snake to raise her cloacal region, allowing the cloacae of the two snakes to move together. The male then coils his tail, surrounding the female, and they copulate. The strongest and largest male is often the victor. However, females are physically much larger and stronger and may decide to choose from among the males. Courtship and mating occur almost exclusively in water.


title: Green anaconda

text: Mating is followed by a gestation period of six to seven months. The species is ovoviviparous, with females giving birth to live young. Litters usually consist of 20 to 40 offspring, although as many as 100 may be produced. After giving birth, females may lose up to half their weight.


title: Green anaconda

text: Neonates are around long and receive no parental care. Because of their small size, they often fall prey to other animals. Should they survive, they grow rapidly until they reach sexual maturity in their first few years, after which they continue to grow at a slower pace.


title: Green anaconda

text: However, when no male anacondas are available to provide offspring, facultative parthenogenesis is possible. In August 2014, West Midlands Safari Park announced that on 12 August 2014 a female green anaconda, which was being kept with another female anaconda, through parthenogenesis had given birth to three young.


title: Green anaconda

text: Green Anacondas in the wild live for approximately 10 years. In captivity, however, they can live up to 30 years and beyond. The current "Guinness Book of World Records" for the oldest living snake in captivity is a green anaconda aged 37 years 317 days when verified (14 May 2021 – Paul Swires) held by Annie the Green Anaconda, currently at Montecasino Bird & Reptile Park in Johannesburg, South Africa.


title: Green anaconda

text: Anacondas have been portrayed in horror literature and films, often incredibly gigantic and with the ability to swallow adult humans; these traits are occasionally also attributed to other species, such as the Burmese python, the reticulated python (the only snake listed here actually confirmed to have eaten adult humans in the wild) and the boa constrictor (although the latter does not grow large enough to kill and swallow a human). Among the most popular of such films are the 1997 film "Anaconda" and its four sequels.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: The Bachelorette is an American reality television dating game show that debuted on ABC on January 8, 2003. The show is a spin-off of "The Bachelor" and the staple part of "The Bachelor" franchise. The first season featured Trista Rehn, the runner-up from the first season of "The Bachelor", offering the opportunity for Rehn to choose a husband among 25 bachelors. The 2004 season of "The Bachelorette" again took a runner-up from the previous season of "The Bachelor". After last airing on February 28, 2005, the series returned to ABC during the spring of 2008, following an absence of three years, and has since become an annual staple of the network's summer programming.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: For its first 16 seasons the show was hosted by Chris Harrison. JoJo Fletcher took on temporary hosting duties during season 16 when Harrison was isolating having taken his son to college.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: In March 2021, the show announced it would air two seasons for the first time ever. The seventeenth season debuted on June 7, 2021, with former Bachelorettes Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe as hosts. The eighteenth season premiered on October 19, 2021 with Adams and Bristowe returning as co-hosts.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: In March 2022, it was announced that there would be two Bachelorettes in one season. The 19th season premiered on July 11, 2022 with Jesse Palmer as host. Although season 11 featured two Bachelorettes in the first episode, and season 16 featured two consecutive Bachelorettes within a season, this marked the first time that two women lead concurrently for the entire season.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: All of the rules are adapted from the rules of its parent show, "The Bachelor". As the name implies, it is essentially a gender-swapped version of "The Bachelor": the series revolves around a single bachelorette, usually a former contestant from a recent "Bachelor" season, and a pool of romantic interests (typically 25, though sometimes more) which could include a potential husband for the bachelorette. The show starts with the bachelorette standing in front of the mansion and greeting each male contestant individually, as they make an entrance to the bachelorette. After each rose ceremony, at least one contestant does not receive a rose and goes home; therefore, the pool of contenders gets smaller, and eventually leaves the bachelorette to decide between two contestants in the final rose ceremony.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: For the final selection, one of two male suitors proposes to the bachelorette. Unlike its parent show, all sixteen seasons of "The Bachelorette" have ended with a proposal which the bachelorette either accepted or declined. The series has resulted in five marriages to date: Trista Rehn's to Ryan Sutter, Ashley Hebert's to JP Rosenbaum, Desiree Hartsock's to Chris Siegfried, Rachel Lindsay’s to Bryan Abasolo, and JoJo Fletcher's to Jordan Rodgers. The first two weddings were broadcast on ABC. Season 16 was the only season did not hold an "After the Final Rose" special due to circumstances over the COVID-19 pandemic and Christmas holiday.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: Season 11 was the first season to feature a twist in casting. Since producers could not decide between "The Bachelor" Season 19 contenders Kaitlyn Bristowe and Britt Nilsson, the 25 men participating had to decide which bachelorette would make the best wife. In the end, more men voted for Kaitlyn and Britt was sent home on the first night.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: Season 13 was the first season to have an African-American contestant, Rachel Lindsay, as the lead in the entire "Bachelor" franchise. Season 16 was the first season to feature two bachelorettes. Clare Crawley was initially cast, but left the show after becoming engaged to contestant Dale Moss. Tayshia Adams was then brought in to complete the season.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: In March 2021, after host Chris Harrison announced he was "stepping away" from the franchise, former Bachelorettes Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe were announced as co-hosts for season 17. In June 2021, a day after the season 17 premiere, Harrison announced he was leaving the franchise altogether.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: Season 19 was the second season to feature two bachelorettes, Gabby Windey and Rachel Recchia. But unlike season 16, those two would be co-leads for the entire season. Cheryl Burke is now reported to be in talks to become the new Bachelorette.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: "The Bachelorette" season 4 winner, Jesse Csincsak, commented that contestants must follow producers' orders and that a storyline was fabricated in the editing room.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: On March 15, 2010, "The Bachelorette" creator Mike Fleiss appeared on "20/20" to confess that he developed the show's contestants into characters that catered to his audience's tastes, and that they "need [their] fair share of villains every season". Fleiss has come under fire for admitting that "The Bachelor" has less to do with reality than it does making good television.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: By season 7 of "The Bachelorette", some believed that actors were being hired by ABC to play specific roles on the show. Some viewers were becoming tired of the show's scripted nature and speaking out.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: In 2018, Amy Kaufman published a book titled, "Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America's Favorite Guilty Pleasure". This book provided insight on some of the manipulation tactics that producers employ in order to create drama and garner controversy as a ratings ploy.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: The podcast Game of Roses launched in 2019 and critiques the series as a 'game'. They have since published the book 'How to win The Bachelor'.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: Much like the parent show, the first two seasons were filmed in a luxurious house in Los Angeles County, California, and "Villa De La Vina" in Agoura Hills, California for later seasons. Since the fifth season, the third and remaining episodes filmed around the world. Episodes have been filmed throughout the United States, Canada, Spain, Iceland, Turkey, Portugal, Thailand, China (Hong Kong only), Bermuda, England, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Ireland. In season 3, filming was located in New York City; Charlotte, North Carolina for season 8, where Emily Maynard lived, so that she could stay with her daughter Ricki during production. In addition to Villa De La Vina mansion, the contestants in seasons 4 and 5 lived in a bunkhouse close to the mansion.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: Due to the concerns surrounding over the COVID-19 pandemic, when the mansion was strictly restricted for filming purposes, the sixteenth and seventeenth seasons filmed entirely within the United States being isolated on a quarantine type bio-secure bubble atmosphere around single location at the hotel or resort they rented by production. While the eighteenth season filmed mostly in the United States, some quarantine restrictions began lifted with limited travel.


title: The Bachelorette (American TV series)

text: On April 10, 2019, it was announced that a two-hour special titled "Bachelorette Reunion: The Biggest Bachelorette Reunion in Bachelor History Ever!" would premiere on May 6, 2019. Bachelorettes from seasons 2 and 3, Meredith Phillips and Jen Schefft didn't make an appearance during the reunion special. Although host Chris Harrison claimed Meredith Phillips was unavailable to attend, Reality Steve reported her sending him the text "“No, I was never contacted or spoke to anyone. I didn’t even know the show was happening.”" in regards to the reunion. Schefft couldn't make it due to a long-planned family vacation.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac ( , ; 6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian, and duelist.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the 17th century. Today, he is best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand's most noted drama, "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1897), which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains invention and myth.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Since the 1970s, there has been a resurgence in the study of Cyrano, demonstrated in the abundance of theses, essays, articles and biographies published in France and elsewhere.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Cyrano's short life is poorly documented. Certain significant chapters of his life are known only from the Preface to the "Histoire Comique par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, Contenant les Estats & Empires de la Lune" ("Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon") published in 1657, nearly two years after his death. Without Henri Le Bret, who wrote the biographical information, his country childhood, his military engagement, the injuries it caused, his prowess as a swordsman, the circumstances of his death and his supposed final conversion would remain unknown.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Since 1862, when Auguste Jal revealed that the “Lord of Bergerac” was Parisian and not Gascon, research in parish registries and notarial records by a small number of researchers, in particular Madeleine Alcover of Rice University, has allowed the public to know more about his genealogy, his family, his home in Paris and those of some of his friends, but has revealed no new documents that support or refute the essentials of Le Bret's account or fill the gaps in his narrative.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Savinien II de Cyrano was the son of Abel I de Cyrano, lord of Mauvières, (156?-1648), counsel ("avocat") of the Parliament of Paris, and of Espérance Bellanger (1586-164?), "daughter of deceased nobleman Estienne Bellanger, Counsellor of the King and Treasurer of his Finances".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: His paternal grandfather, Savinien I de Cyrano (15??-1590), was probably born into a notable family from Sens in Burgundy. Documents describe him in turn as a "merchant and burgher of Paris" ("« marchand et bourgeois de Paris »" 20 May 1555), "(sea-)fish merchant to the King" ("« vendeur de poisson de mer pour le Roy »") in several other documents in following years, and finally "Royal counsellor" ("« conseiller du Roi, maison et couronne de France »" 7 April 1573). In Paris, on 9April 1551, he married Anne Le Maire, daughter of Estienne Le Maire and Perrette Cardon, who died in 1616. They are known to have had four children: Abel (the writer's father), Samuel (15??-1646), Pierre (15??-1626) and Anne (15??-1652).


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Of his maternal grandfather, Estienne Bellanger, "Financial Controller of the Parisian general revenue" ("« contrôleur des finances en la recette générale de Paris »"), and of his background, we know almost nothing. We know more about his wife, Catherine Millet, whose father, Guillaume II Millet, Lord of Caves, was secretary of the King's finances, and whose grandfather, Guillaume I Millet (149?-1563), qualified in medicine in 1518, was doctor to three kings in succession (Francis I, Henry II and Francis II). He married Catherine Valeton, daughter of a property tax collector from Nantes, Audebert Valeton, who, accused of involvement in the Affair of the Placards, was "burned alive on wood taken from his house" on 21 January 1535 at the crossroads of "la Croix du Trahoir" (the intersection of the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec and the Rue Saint-Honoré), in front of the "Pavillon des singes", where Molière lived almost a century later.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Espérance Bellanger and Abel I de Cyrano were married on 3September 1612 at the church of St-Gervais-et-St-Protais. She was at least twenty-six years old; he was about forty-five. Their marriage contract, signed the previous 12July at the office of Master Denis Feydeau, counsellor, secretary and king's notary, second cousin of the bride, was only published in the year 2000 by Madeleine Alcover, who minutely traces the fate of the witnesses (and more particularly their links with pious milieus) and notes that many of them "had entered the worlds of high finance, the "noblesse de robe", of the aristocracy (including the Court) and even the "noblesse d'épée"".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In 1911 Jean Lemoine made known the inventory of Abel de Cyrano's worldly goods. His library, relatively poorly stocked (126 volumes), testifies to his schooling as a jurist and to an open curiosity: a taste for languages and ancient literature, the great humanists of the Renaissance (Erasmus, Rabelais, Juan Luis Vives), knowledge of Italian, interest in the sciences. On the religious side, one notices the presence of two Bibles, of an Italian New Testament and the Prayers of St. Basil in Greek, but no pious works. There is no object of that kind (engraving, painting, statue, crucifix) amongst the other inventoried items, but in contrast "twelve small paintings of portraits of gods and goddesses" and "four wax figures: one of Venus and Cupid, another of a woman pulling a thorn, one of a flageolet player and one of an ashamed nude woman". Finally, one notes the presence of several books by well-known Protestants: the "Discours politiques et militaires" ("Political and Military Discourse") of François de la Noue, two volumes of George Buchanan, the "Dialectique" of Pierre de La Ramée, the "Alphabet de plusieurs sortes de lettres" ("Alphabet of different kinds of letters") by master calligrapher Pierre Hamon and "La Vérité de la religion chrétienne" ("The Truth of the Christian Religion") by Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, whose presence confirms that Abel spent his younger years in Huguenot surroundings.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Finally, after long exertion, I knew that Abel Cyrano had left the neighbourhood of Saint-Eustache for that of Saint-Sauveur, and that Espérance Bellanger had given birth in this new dwelling to a boy whose baptismal record is as follows: "The sixth of March one thousand six hundred and nineteen, Savinien, son of Abel de Cyrano, squire, Lord of Mauvières, and of the lady Espérance Bellenger ("sic"), the godfather, nobleman Antoine Fanny, King's Counsellor and Auditor in his Court of Finances, of this parish, the godmother the lady Marie Fédeau ("sic"), wife of nobleman Master Louis Perrot, Counsellor and Secretary to the King, Household and Crown of France, of the parish of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois". This son of Abel de Cyrano who was not given the name of his godfather, Antoine, because he had a brother of that name, born in 1616, but was named Savinien in memory of his grandfather, who could doubt that this was the Savinien Cyrano who was born, according to the biographers, at the chateau of Bergerac in or around 1620?


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The surname "Fanny" appears nowhere in the very complete study of "La Chambre des comptes de Paris" ("Court of Finances of Paris") published by Count H. Coustant d'Yanville in 1875 (or for that matter in any other French document of the 17th century). In 1898, Viscount Oscar de Poli suggested that it must have been a transcription error and proposed reading it as "Lamy". An Antoine Lamy had actually been accepted as an auditor of finances on 2September 1602, a year before Pierre de Maupeou, Espérance Bellanger's cousin and son-in-law of Denis Feydeau who was a witness to the marriage of Savinien's parents in 1612. His wife, Catherine Vigor, associate of Vincent de Paul, would become President of the "Confrérie de la Charité de Gentilly" ("Charitable Fellowship of Gentilly") where the couple set up a mission in 1634. She could well be the godmother of Catherine de Cyrano.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Marie Feydeau, cosponsor with Antoine Lamy, was the sister of Denis and Antoine Feydeau and the wife of Louis (or Loys) Perrot (15??-1625), who, apart from his titles of "King's Counsellor and Secretary", also had that of "King's Interpreter of Foreign Languages".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In 1622, Abel de Cyrano left Paris with his family and went to settle on his lands at Mauvières and Bergerac in the "Vallée de Chevreuse", which had come to him in part after the death of his mother in 1616.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: His possessions, situated on the banks of the Yvette River in the parish of Saint-Forget, had been purchased by Savinien I de Cyrano forty years earlier from Thomas de Fortboys, who had bought them himself in 1576 from Lord Dauphin de Bergerac (or Bergerat), whose ancestors had possessed them for more than a century.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: When Savinien I de Cyrano acquired it, the domain of Mauvières consisted of "a habitable mansion…with a lower room, a cellar beneath, kitchen, pantry, an upper chamber, granaries, stables, barn, portal, all roofed with tiles, with courtyard, walled dovecote; mill, enclosed plot, garden and fishpond, the right of middle and low justice…".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The estate of Bergerac, which adjoined Mauvières, "comprised a house with portal, courtyard, barn, hovel and garden, being an acre or thereabouts, plus forty-six and a half acres, of which thirty-six and a half were farmland and ten woodland, with the rights of middle and low justice".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: It was in this rustic setting that the child grew up and in the neighbouring parish he learnt to read and write. His friend Le Bret recalls:


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The education that we had together with a good country priest who took in boarders, made us friends from our most tender youth, and I remember the aversion he had from that time for one who seemed to him a shadow of Sidias, because, in the thoughts which that man could somewhat grasp, he believed him incapable of teaching him anything; so that he paid so little attention to his lessons and his corrections that his father, who was a fine old gentleman, fairly unconcerned for his children's education and overly credulous of this one's complaints, removed him [from the school] a little too suddenly and, without considering if his son would be better off elsewhere, he sent him to that city [Paris] where he left him, until the age of nineteen years, to his own devices.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: It is unknown at what age Savinien arrived in Paris. He may have been accommodated by his uncle Samuel de Cyrano in a large family residence in the Rue des Prouvaires, where his parents had lived up until 1618. In this theory, it was there that he was introduced to his cousin Pierre, with whom, according to Le Bret, he would build a lasting friendship.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: He continued his secondary studies at an academy which remains unknown. It has long been maintained that he attended the Collège de Beauvais where the action of the comedy "Le pédant joué" takes place and whose principal, Jean Grangier would inspire the character of Granger, the pedant of "Le pédant joué", but his presence in June 1641 as a student of rhetoric at the "Collège de Lisieux" (see below), has encouraged more recent historians to revise that opinion.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In 1636, his father sold Mauvières and Bergerac to Antoine Balestrier, Lord of Arbalestre, and returned to Paris to live with his family in "a modest dwelling at the top of the great Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques close to the Crossing" (parish of Saint-Jacques and Saint-Philippe), a short distance from the "Collège de Lisieux". But there is no certainty that Savinien went to live with them.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: That age when nature is most easily corrupted, and that great liberty he had to only do that which seemed good to him, brought him to a dangerous weakness ("penchant"), which I dare say I stopped…


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Historians and biographers do not agree on this "penchant" which threatened to corrupt Cyrano's nature. As an example of the romantic imagination of some biographers, Frédéric Lachèvre wrote:


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Against an embittered and discontented father, Cyrano promptly forgot the way to his father's house. Soon he was counted among the gluttons and hearty drinkers of the best inns, with them he gave himself up to jokes of questionable taste, usually following prolonged libations…He also picked up the deplorable habit of gambling. This kind of life could not continue indefinitely, especially since Abel de Cyrano had become completely deaf to his son's repeated requests for funds.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Since nothing binds Cyrano to the humble lodgings of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques to which the uncertainties of fate condemned his family, he gives himself over entirely to Paris, to its streets and, according to the words of one of his close friends, "to its excrescences" ("à ses verrues"). He drinks, diligently frequents the Rue Glatigny, called Val d'amour, because of the women who sell pleasure there, gambles, roams the sleeping city to frighten the bourgeois or forge signs, provokes the watch, gets into debt and links himself with that literary Bohemia which centered around Tristan L'Hermite and Saint-Amant and cultivated the memory of Théophile and his impious lyricism.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In his voluminous biography of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, Jean-Luc Hennig suggests that the poet-musician had begun around 1636 (at thirty-one) a homosexual relationship with Cyrano, then seventeen. In support of this hypothesis, he notes that both had families from Sens, a lawyer father and religious brothers and sisters, that the elder only liked youths and in regard to the women of Montpellier who accused him in 1656 of neglecting them, he wrote that "all of that has no more foundation than their fanciful imagination, already concerned, which had taught them "the long-time habits" [that he] had had with C[hapelle], late D[e] B[ergerac] and late C."


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: He was the son of Abel de Cyrano, lord of Mauvières and Bergerac, and Espérance Bellanger. He received his first education from a country priest and had for a fellow pupil his friend and future biographer Henri Lebret. He then proceeded to Paris and the heart of the Latin Quarter, to the college de Dormans-Beauvais, where he had as master Jean Grangier, whom he afterwards ridiculed in his comedy "Le Pédant joué" ("The Pedant Tricked") of 1654. At the age of nineteen, he entered a corps of the guards, serving in the campaigns of 1639 and 1640. As a minor nobleman and officer he was notorious for his dueling and boasting. His unique past allowed him to make unique contributions to French art.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: One author, Ishbel Addyman, varies from other biographers and claims that he was not a Gascon aristocrat, but a descendant of a Sardinian fishmonger, and that the appellation Bergerac stemmed from a small estate near Paris where he was born, not in Gascony, and that he may have suffered tertiary syphilis. She also claims that he may have been homosexual and around 1640 became the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a writer and musician, until around 1653, when they became engaged in a bitter rivalry. This led to Bergerac sending d'Assoucy death threats that compelled him to leave Paris. The quarrel extended to a series of satirical texts by both men. Bergerac wrote "Contre Soucidas" (an anagram of his enemy's name) and "Contre un ingrat" (Against an ingrate), while D'Assoucy counterattacked with "Le Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le singe de Brioché, au bout du Pont-Neuf" (The battle of Cyrano de Bergerac with the monkey of Brioché, at the end of the Pont-Neuf). He also associated with Théophile de Viau, the French poet and libertine.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: He is said to have left the military and returned to Paris to pursue literature, producing tragedies cast in the orthodox classical mode.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The model for the character Roxane in Rostand's play "Cyrano de Bergerac" was Bergerac's cousin, who lived with his sister, Catherine de Bergerac, at the Convent of the Daughter of the Cross. As in the play, Bergerac did fight at the Siege of Arras in 1640, a battle of the Thirty Years' War between French and Spanish forces in France (though this was not the Battle of Arras, fought fourteen years later). During the siege he suffered a neck wound from a sword during a sortie by the Spanish defenders, a day before the surrender of the Spanish troops and the end of the siege. One of his confrères in the battle was the Baron Christian of Neuvillette, who married Cyrano's cousin. However, the plotline of Rostand's play involving Roxane and Christian is entirely fictional.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Cyrano was a pupil of the French polymath Pierre Gassendi, a canon of the Catholic Church who tried to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Cyrano de Bergerac's works "L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune" (""Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon"", published posthumously, 1657) and "Les États et Empires du Soleil" ("The States and Empires of the Sun", 1662) are classics of early modern science fiction. In the former, Cyrano travels to the Moon using rockets powered by firecrackers (it may be the earliest description of a space flight by use of a vessel that has rockets attached) and meets the inhabitants. The Moon-men have four legs, firearms that shoot game and cook it, and talking earrings used to educate children.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: His mixture of science and romance in the last two works furnished a model for many subsequent writers, among them Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe and probably Voltaire. Corneille and Molière freely borrowed ideas from "Le Pédant joué".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The play suggests that he was injured by a falling wooden beam in 1654 while entering the house of his patron, the Duc D'Arpajon. However the academic and editor of Cyrano's works Madeleine Alcover uncovered a contemporary text which suggests an attack on the Duke's carriage in which a member of his household was injured. It is as yet inconclusive whether or not Cyrano's death was a result of the injury, or an unspecified disease. He died over a year later on July 28, 1655, aged 36, at the house of his cousin, Pierre De Cyrano, in Sannois. He was buried in a church in Sannois. However, there is strong evidence to support the theory that his death was a result of a botched assassination attempt as well as further damage to his health caused by a period of confinement in a private asylum, orchestrated by his enemies, who succeeded in enlisting the help of his own brother Abel de Cyrano.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In 1897, the French poet Edmond Rostand published a play, "Cyrano de Bergerac", on the subject of Cyrano's life. This play, which became Rostand's most successful work, revolves around Cyrano's love for the beautiful Roxane, whom he is obliged to woo on behalf of a more conventionally handsome but less articulate friend, Christian de Neuvillette.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The play has been made into operas and adapted for cinema several times and reworked in other literary forms and as a ballet.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: "The Adventures of Cyrano De Bergerac", by Louis Gallet, was published in English by Jarrolds Publishers (London) in 1900. It bears no resemblance to Rostand's play apart from the characteristics of the de Bergerac character.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Cyrano appears as one of the main characters of the "Riverworld" series of books by Philip José Farmer.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Cyrano de Bergerac served as an inspiration for the creation of Saint-Savin, one of the main characters of Umberto Eco's novel "The Island of the Day Before".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In A. L. Kennedy's novel "So I Am Glad", the narrator finds de Bergerac has appeared in her modern-day house share.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: In Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Glory Road", Oscar Gordon fights a character who is not named, but is obviously Cyrano.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: John Shirley published a story about Cyrano called "Cyrano and the Two Plumes" in a French anthology; it was reprinted at "The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction".


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: The novel by Adam Browne, "Pyrotechnicon: Being a TRUE ACCOUNT of Cyrano de Bergerac's FURTHER ADVENTURES among the STATES and EMPIRES of the STARS, by HIMSELF (Dec'd)", was a sequel to Cyrano's science fiction, published by Keith Stevenson, 2014.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: "The Lost Sonnets of Cyrano de Bergerac: A Poetic Fiction" by James L. Carcioppolo. Published in English by Lost Sonnet Publishing (Benicia, California) in 1998. Fiction poetry with the premise that Cyrano wrote a sequence of 57 sonnets during the last year of his life. Heavily annotated.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: Most recently his likeness was the center of a musical romantic drama, Cyrano (film), adapted as a screenplay by Erica Schmidt who had previously written the script as a stage musical of the same name. Schmidt's husband, Peter Dinklage, starred as Cyrano. The film was widely received with positive reviews and went on to be nominated for awards at the 79th Golden Globe Awards, four nominations at the 75th British Academy Film Awards and a Best Costume Design nod at the 94th Academy Awards.


title: Cyrano de Bergerac

text: There is also a popular French film, "Cyrano de Bergerac (1990 film)," starring Gerard Depeardiu"." Additionally, Cyrano de Bergerac is the premise of an early 20th century film, Cyrano de Bergerac (1925 film), and a mid-20th century film, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950 film).


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983), styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt was professor of art history at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work "Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700", first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in a slightly revised version by Richard Beresford in 1999, when it was still considered the best account of the subject.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union. He was considered to be the "fourth man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of Cambridge-educated spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s. He was the fourth discovered, with John Cairncross yet to be revealed. The height of his espionage activity was during World War II, when he passed intelligence on Wehrmacht plans that the British government had decided to withhold from its ally. His confession, a closely guarded secret for years, was revealed publicly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. He was stripped of his knighthood immediately thereafter. Blunt had been exposed in print by historian Andrew Boyle earlier that year.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt was born in Bournemouth, in Hampshire at that time but now in Dorset, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd (Arthur) Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929), and his wife, Hilda Violet (1880–1969), daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: His siblings included the writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt's father, a vicar, was assigned to Paris with the British embassy chapel, and moved his family to the French capital for several years during Anthony's childhood. The young Anthony became fluent in French and experienced intensely the artistic culture available to him there, stimulating an interest which lasted a lifetime and formed the basis for his later career.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: He was educated at Marlborough College, a boys' public school in Marlborough, Wiltshire. At Marlborough, Blunt joined the college's secret 'Society of Amici', in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice (whose unfinished autobiography "The Strings Are False" contains numerous references to Blunt), John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He was remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as "an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas". Bowle thought Blunt had "too much ink in his veins and belonged to a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism".


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In 1928 Blunt founded a political magazine, "Venture", of which the contributors were left-wing writers.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt won a scholarship in mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge. At that time, scholars at Cambridge University were allowed to skip Part I of the Tripos examinations and complete Part II in two years. However, they could not earn a degree in less than three years, hence Blunt spent four years at Trinity and switched to Modern Languages, eventually graduating in 1930 with a first class degree. He taught French at Cambridge and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1932. His graduate research was in French art history and he travelled frequently to continental Europe in connection with his studies.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Like Guy Burgess, Blunt was known to be homosexual, the practice of which was a criminal offence at the time in Britain. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles (also known as the Conversazione Society), a clandestine Cambridge discussion group of 12 undergraduates, mostly from Trinity and King's Colleges who considered themselves to be the brightest minds. Through the Apostles, he met the future poet Julian Bell (son of Vanessa Bell) and took him as a lover. Many others were homosexual and also Marxist at that time. Amongst other members were Victor Rothschild and the American Michael Whitney Straight, the latter also later suspected of being part of the Cambridge spy ring. Rothschild later worked for MI5 and also gave Blunt £100 to purchase the painting "Eliezar and Rebecca" by Nicolas Poussin. The painting was sold by Blunt's executors in 1985 for £100,000 (totalling £192,500 with tax remission) and is now in Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: There are numerous versions of how Blunt was recruited to the NKVD. As a Cambridge don, Blunt visited the Soviet Union in 1933, and was possibly recruited in 1934. In a press conference, Blunt claimed that Guy Burgess recruited him as a spy. The historian Geoff Andrews writes that he was "recruited between 1935 and 1936", while his biographer Miranda Carter says that it was in January 1937 that Burgess introduced Blunt to his Soviet recruiter, Arnold Deutsch. Shortly after meeting Deutsch, writes Carter, Blunt became a Soviet "talent spotter" and was given the NKVD code name 'Tony'. Blunt may have identified Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Michael Straight – all undergraduates at Trinity College (except Maclean at the neighbouring Trinity Hall), a few years younger than he – as potential spies for the Soviets.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt said in his public confession that it was Burgess who converted him to the Soviet cause, after both had left Cambridge. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles, and Burgess could have recruited Blunt or vice versa either at Cambridge University or later when both worked for British intelligence.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: With the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet forces, Blunt joined the British Army in 1939. During the Phoney War he served in France in the Intelligence Corps. When the Wehrmacht drove British forces back to Dunkirk in May 1940, he was part of the Dunkirk evacuation. During that same year he was recruited to MI5, the Security Service. Before the war, MI5 employed mostly former members of the Indian Imperial Police.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In MI5, Blunt began passing the results of Ultra intelligence (from decrypted Enigma intercepts of Wehrmacht radio traffic on the Eastern Front) to the Soviets, as well as details of German spy rings operating in the Soviet Union. Ultra was primarily working on the Kriegsmarine naval codes, which eventually helped win the Battle of the Atlantic, but as the war progressed Wehrmacht army codes were also broken. Sensitive receivers could pick up transmissions, relating to German war plans, from Berlin. There was great risk that, if the Germans discovered their codes had been compromised, they would change the settings of the Enigma wheels, blinding the codebreakers.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Full details of the entire Operation Ultra were fully known by only four people, only one of whom routinely worked at Bletchley Park. Dissemination of Ultra information did not follow usual intelligence protocol but maintained its own communications channels. Military intelligence officers gave intercepts to Ultra liaisons, who in turn forwarded the intercepts to Bletchley Park. Information from decoded messages was then passed back to military leaders through the same channels. Thus, each link in the communications chain knew only one particular job and not the overall Ultra details. Nobody outside Bletchley Park knew the source.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: John Cairncross, another of the Cambridge Five, was posted from MI6 to work at Bletchley Park. Blunt admitted to recruiting Cairncross and may well have been the cut-out between Cairncross and the Soviet contacts. For although the Soviet Union was now an ally, Russians were not trusted. Some information concerned German preparations and detailed plans for the Battle of Kursk, the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a wartime British agent, recalls meeting Kim Philby and Victor Rothschild, a friend of Blunt since Trinity College, Cambridge. He reported that at the Paris meeting in late 1955 Rothschild argued that much more Ultra material should have been given to Stalin. For once, Philby reportedly dropped his reserve, and agreed.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: During the war, Blunt attained the rank of major. After WWII, Blunt's espionage activity diminished, but he retained contact with Soviet agents and continued to pass them gossip from his former MI5 colleagues and documents from Burgess. This continued until the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In April 1945, Blunt, who had worked part-time at the Royal Library, was offered and accepted the job of Surveyor of the King's Pictures. His predecessor, Kenneth Clark, had resigned earlier that year. The Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, who had become friends with Blunt during the two years he worked in the Royal Collection, recommended him for the job. Morshead had been impressed with Blunt's "diligence, his habitual reticence, and his perfect manners." Blunt often visited Morshead's home in Windsor. Blunt's student Oliver Millar, who would become his successor as Surveyor, said, "I think Anthony was happier there than many other places". Miranda Carter, Blunt's biographer, writes: "The royal family liked him: he was polite, effective and, above all, discreet."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In the final days of World War II in Europe, King George VI asked Blunt to accompany Morshead on a trip in August 1945 to Friedrichshof Castle near Frankfurt, Germany, to retrieve letters (almost 4,000 of them) written by Queen Victoria to her daughter, Empress Victoria, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. The account of the trip in the Royal Archives states that the letters, as well as other documents, "were exposed to risks owing to unsettled conditions after the war." According to Morshead, he needed Blunt, because Blunt knew German and would make it easier to identify the desired material. There was a signed agreement made at the time, since the royal family did not own the documents. The letters rescued by Morshead and Blunt were deposited in the Royal Archives and were returned in 1951.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Miranda Carter mentions that other versions of the story, which claim that the trip was to retrieve letters from the Duke of Windsor to Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, the owner of Friedrichshof, in which the Duke knowingly revealed Allied secrets to Hitler, have some credibility, given the Duke's known Nazi sympathies. Variants of this version have been published by several authors. Carter allows that, while George VI may have also asked Blunt and Morshead to be on the alert for any documents relating to the Duke of Windsor, "it seems unlikely that they found any." Much later Queen Victoria's letters were edited and published in five volumes by Roger Fulford, and it was revealed they contained numerous "embarrassing and 'improper' comments about the awfulness of German politics and culture." Hugh Trevor-Roper remembered discussing the trip with Blunt at MI5 in the autumn of 1945 and recalled (in Carter's retelling): "Blunt's task had been to secure the Vicky correspondence before the Americans found it and published it."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt made three more trips to other locations over the following eighteen months, mainly "to recover royal treasures to which the Crown did not have an automatic right." On one trip he returned with a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript and the diamond crown of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. The King had good reason to worry. The senior U.S. officers at Friedrichshof Castle, Kathleen Nash and Jack Durant, were later arrested for looting and put on trial.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Some people knew of Blunt's role as a Soviet spy long before his public exposure. According to MI5 papers released in 2002, Moura Budberg reported in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but this was ignored. According to Blunt himself, he never joined because Burgess persuaded him that he would be more valuable to the anti-fascist crusade by working with Burgess. He was certainly on friendly terms with Sir Dick White, the head of MI5 and later MI6, in the 1960s, and they used to spend Christmas together with Victor Rothschild in Rothschild's Cambridge house.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: His KGB handlers had also become suspicious at the sheer amount of material he was passing over and suspected him of being a triple agent. Later, he was described by a KGB officer as an "ideological shit".


title: Anthony Blunt

text: With the defection of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow in May 1951, Blunt came under suspicion. He and Burgess had been friends since Cambridge. Maclean was in imminent danger due to decryptions from Venona as the messages were decrypted. Burgess returned on the to Southampton after being suspended from the British Embassy in Washington for his conduct. He was to warn Maclean, who now worked in the Foreign Office but was under surveillance and isolated from secret material. Blunt collected Burgess at Southampton Docks and took him to stay at his flat in London, although he later denied that he had warned the defecting pair. Blunt was interrogated by MI5 in 1952, but gave away little, if anything. Arthur Martin and Jim Skardon had interviewed Blunt eleven times since 1951, but Blunt had admitted nothing.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt was greatly distressed by Burgess's flight and, on 28 May 1951, confided in his friend Goronwy Rees, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had briefly supplied the NKVD with political information in 1938–39. Rees suggested that Burgess had gone to the Soviet Union because of his violent anti-Americanism and belief that America would involve Britain in a Third World War, and that he was a Soviet agent. Blunt suggested that this was not sufficient reason to denounce Burgess to MI5. He pointed out that "Burgess was one of our oldest friends and to denounce him would not be the act of a friend." Blunt quoted E. M. Forster's belief that country was less important than friendship. He argued that "Burgess had told me he was a spy in 1936 and I had not told anyone."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In 1963, MI5 learned of Blunt's espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April 1964, and Queen Elizabeth II was informed shortly thereafter. He also named Jenifer Hart, Phoebe Pool, John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leonard Henry (Leo) Long as spies. Long had also been a member of the Communist Party and an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. During the war he served in MI14 military intelligence in the War Office, with responsibility for assessing German offensive plans. He passed analyses but not original material relating to the Eastern Front to Blunt.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: According his obituary in "The New York Times"Blunt acknowledged that he had recruited spies for the Soviet Union from among young radical students at Cambridge, passed information to the Russians while he served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer during World War II, and had helped two of his former Cambridge students who had become Soviet "moles" inside the British Foreign Service, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, escape to the Soviet Union in 1951 just as their activities were about to be exposed.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: He was convinced that the confession would be kept secret. "I believed, naively, that the security service would see it, partly in its own interest, that the story would never become public," he wrote. Indeed, in return for a full confession, the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret, though only for fifteen years, and granted him full immunity from prosecution. Blunt was not stripped of his knighthood until the PM officially announced his treachery in 1979.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: According to the memoir of MI5 officer Peter Wright, Wright had regular interviews with Blunt from 1964 onwards for six years. Prior to that, he had a briefing with Michael Adeane, the Queen's private secretary, who told Wright: "From time to time you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace – a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: For unknown reasons, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home was not advised of Anthony Blunt's spying, although the Queen and Home Secretary Henry Brooke had been fully informed. In November 1979, then PM Margaret Thatcher formally advised Parliament of Blunt's treachery and the immunity deal that had been arranged.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Blunt's life was little affected by the knowledge of his treachery. In 1966, two years after his secret confession, Noel Annan, provost of King's College, Cambridge, held a dinner party for Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, Ann Fleming, widow of James Bond author Ian Fleming, and Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild and his wife Tess. The Rothschilds brought their friend and lodger – Blunt. All had had wartime connections with British Intelligence; Jenkins at Bletchley Park.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In 1979, Blunt's role was represented in Andrew Boyle's book "Climate of Treason", in which Blunt was given the pseudonym 'Maurice', after the homosexual protagonist of E. M. Forster's novel of that name. In September 1979, Blunt had tried to obtain a typescript before the publication of Boyle's book. "Technically there was no defamation, and Boyle's editor, Harold Harris, refused to cooperate." Blunt's request was reported in the magazine "Private Eye" and drew attention to him. In early November excerpts were published in "The Observer", and on 8 November "Private Eye" revealed that 'Maurice' was Blunt. In interviews to publicise his book, Boyle refused to confirm that Blunt was 'Maurice' and asserted that was the government's responsibility.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Based on an interview with Blunt's solicitor, Michael Rubinstein, who had met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, Blunt's biographer Miranda Carter states that Thatcher, "personally affronted by Blunt's immunity, took the bait. ...she found the whole episode thoroughly reprehensible, and reeking of Establishment collusion."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: On Thursday 15 November 1979, Thatcher revealed Blunt's wartime role in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in reply to questions put to her by Ted Leadbitter, MP for Hartlepool, and Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover:


title: Anthony Blunt

text: Mr. Leadbitter and Mr. Skinner: Asked the Prime Minister if she will make a statement on recent evidence concerning the actions of an individual, whose name has been supplied to her, in relation to the security of the United Kingdom.


title: Anthony Blunt

text: The Prime Minister: "The name which the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Leadbitter) has given me is that of Sir Anthony Blunt."


title: Anthony Blunt

text: In a statement to the news media on 20 November, Blunt claimed the decision to grant him immunity from prosecution was taken by the then prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Speaking in the House of Commons on 21 November, Thatcher disclosed more details of the affair.