Animal house

John Philip Kemble was London’s leading Shakespearean actor in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Once, on his way home from a night of revelry, a thoroughly inebriated Kemble was seized by an irresistible urge to ride a rhino. The obvious place to fulfill his wish was at the city’s famous menagerie, the Exeter Change, in the Strand. Kemble’s rhino ride is just one of the many priceless details found in Caroline Grigson’s "Menagerie: the History of Exotic Animals in England."
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