An interactive reveals the private thoughts of the world leaders portrayed in William Orpen's painting of the Versailles treaty – David Lloyd George described his French opposite number Georges Clemenceau as "a disagreeable and rather bad-tempered old savage".
On other, more active days, he might want to be fuming with the rather ill-tempered Gengar or Mewtwo (or whatever his current favorites are among the Pokemon), or feeling helpless and adorable with Stuart Little, or scowling along with Batman or Superman (or Wonder Woman? Where is she, producers of America?).
The Lady's Last Stake (1707) is a rather bad-tempered reply to critics of Lady Easy's wifely patience in The Careless Husband.
THE Cyclopses, according to mythology, were a race of bad-tempered and rather stupid one-eyed giants.
Neither species are well known for their tolerance but rather for being bad-tempered and aggressive.
Says Graeme Shannon, from the Mammalian Behavior and Evolution group at the University of Liverpool: " Neither species are well known for their tolerance but rather for being bad- tempered and aggressive.
My "pets" included a 40-year-old tortoise, a grey parrot called Kasuku, and Pecky, a bad-tempered ostrich – all rather different from my British friends' animals.
Vanished by Tim Weaver Penguinn, £7.99) Weaver's "skip-tracer" David Raker – who finds missing persons by any means necessary – is one of those characters whose genteel, well-tempered narration is rather at odds with his line of work.
"I think he did know how to be - oh, what's the word? - curmudgeonly, you know," says Blake. "But my feeling about it was that he was often in pain or discomfort, and he would rather be a bit bad-tempered than actually complain - which is a thing I'm sure he'd never do.
"He has to calibrate it just the right way so she continues to engage him, rather than paint him as hot-tempered".
