Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Sat 03 Mar 2007Enduring magic of creatures in a cabinetAnother Life/Michael Viney:My teenage town of Brighton was great for free museums, essential to the reveries of a non-sporting boy with a bike. At the Royal Pavilion there was a library that let me take nine books at once and two floors of huge stuffed animals, totem poles and Roman things dug up on the Downs.Up the Dyke Road was the Booth Bird Museum, perhaps the finest incarnation of Victorian taxidermy in the whole of southern England: not an eagle's feather, bustard's glass eye or wisp of dried moss out of place in an all-subsuming silence.