Do all the different styles of moustache have names?

QUESTION: Do all the different styles of moustache have names?

They do. Over the years, moustaches have been categorised into various styles, often influenced by cultural trends, historical figures and unique characteristics.

Classic styles include the Chevron, a thick and wide moustache that covers the upper lip, worn with panache by Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I. and Freddie Mercury of Queen.

There’s the Handlebar, a moustache with long ends that curl upward, giving the appearance of bicycle handlebars; Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had a good one, as did Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs Of New York.

The Horseshoe moustache is shaped like an upside-down horseshoe, extending downward past the lips; Aussie fast bowler Merv Hughes struck fear into opposing batsmen with his, and the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan has one.

The Walrus is a thick and bushy moustache that droops over the upper lip, resembling the whiskers of a walrus; former British prime minister David Lloyd George had one, and it was singer David Crosby’s signature.

The Pencil is a thin, finely groomed moustache just above the upper lip, popular with movie stars of the Golden Age such as David Niven, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn.

There’s the once-popular Toothbrush moustache, a thin moustache with vertical sides approximating the width of the nose. Its most famous wearer was Adolf Hitler, which has led to its demise.

Other styles include the Anchor (Robert Downey Jr), Lampshade (Eddie Murphy) and the Boxcar (a rectangular cut).

There are eponymous styles such as the Fu Manchu, named after Sax Rohmer’s fictional villain.

This moustache grows long and thin, extending downward past the chin. 

The Dali is a whimsical, thin moustache with sharp, upward-curving ends, famously worn by Spanish artist Salvador Dali, while the Zapata is a thick moustache that extends outward beyond the corners of the mouth, popularised by Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

Rachel Watson, Skipton, North Yorks

QUESTION: Why is there more land in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere?

The unequal distribution of land between the northern and southern hemispheres arises from geological and plate tectonic processes over Earth’s history. 

Today, the northern hemisphere has 68 per cent of the planet’s landmass, including the large continents of North America, Europe and most of Asia. This has not always been the case. In the early Phanerozoic Eon (541 million years ago), almost all of the continents were in the southern hemisphere, with Gondwana, the largest continent, spanning from the South Pole to the equator.

Around 320 million years ago, there was a major geological collision as Gondwana, Laurussia and other nearby land masses smashed together and created the supercontinent Pangaea. This stretched in a C-shape from the North Pole to the South.

The current imbalance is a result of the break-up of Pangaea approximately 200 million years ago. As Pangaea split and tectonic plates moved, land masses were redistributed.

Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge

QUESTION: Which political figure has had the most statues created in their honour?

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This is a difficult question to answer because it is unlikely that they have all been counted and catalogued and many have been destroyed or replaced.

Statues of political figures predominate in countries that have personality cults, which means they may be common in that country but not so in the rest of the world. 

The statues seldom outlive their subjects, as they are torn down and replaced by statues of their successors. 

Those of us of a certain age can recall TV footage of the statues of Nicolae Ceausescu being torn down when he was deposed as dictator of Romania in 1989.

However, statues of ‘founding fathers’ tend to do better. There are more than 7,000 known statues of Lenin in the world (there were more than 15,000 before 1991), most of them being in Russia. 

It is difficult to imagine any other political figure having more. Mao Zedong has more than 2,000 known statues in China.

By comparison, George Washington, the founding father of the United States, has only 100 statues in the U.S., plus another 100 memorials.

In Turkey, every school has a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the moderniser of Turkey following the ending of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, which would put him in the running.

Bob Dillon, Edinburgh