'The moral core of Grahame’s book' … Mr Badger and friends. Illustration by Michael Foreman.

My hero: Mr Badger by Patrick Barkham

The welcome arrival of Kenneth Grahame's Mr Badger marked a turning point in human relations with the brave and elusive creature

Patrick Barkham

Friday 6 December 2013

In 1908, Mole caught sight of Badger peering from a hedge. Badger trotted forward, grunted, "H'm! Company," and disappeared again. "Simply hates society!" explained the Water Rat. With that beautifully accurate cameo, Mr Badger stepped on to the pages of The Wind in the Willows – Will Tuckett's adaptation of which is at London's Duchess theatre this Christmas – and transformed our perception of Britain's largest carnivorous mammal.

Wings of desire: how butterflies have captivated artists

From Bruegel to Nabokov and The Silence of the Lambs, butterflies have flitted through our imaginations and into our culture. Patrick Barkham pins up the choice specimens – and finds out why new film The Duke of Burgundy is awash with them

Patrick Barkham
Sunday 15 March 2015 18.00 GMT

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ignifying sunshine, beauty and freedom, butterflies are ubiquitous in our culture, ever-present on greeting cards and used to sell everything from oven chips to SUVs. For artists, novelists and film-makers, however, butterflies and moths have often taken on darker meanings. In John Fowles’s The Collector, the protagonist (played by Terence Stamp in the film adaptation) is a butterfly obsessive who decides to collect young women. In The Silence of the Lambs, a sinister-looking moth (actually the death’s-head hawkmoth) is a serial killer’s signature. And in The Duke of Burgundy, a new film by Peter Strickland, the story of an S&M relationship is told through butterflies and moths. How have these insects come to symbolise sexual deviancy?