Dancing with admirals and painted ladies

Everyone loves butterflies. Of course we do. Possibly more than any other living thing, they represent to us the terrible fragility of life, the knowledge that however colourful and attractive we may all be, something or someone really unpleasant is waiting around the next corner to smash our face in. This may be why butterfly collectors, men who love butterflies but nonetheless seem compelled to poison them, attach them to bits of cork board and stuff them in a drawer, have become a byword for weirdness and perversity. Who would kill the one you love? As countless TV thrillers have shown, only a complete loon.

Fortunately, mainstream entomology has moved on since Victorian times, and indeed since John Fowles wrote The Collector. Butterfly obsessives, or ‘Aurelians’ as they rather charmingly call themselves, now seek only to find butterflies and photograph them, while scientists are more concerned with their conservation than their dissection.