For an online Who’s Who of the “110,000 important people from antiquity to the present time”, OmniBiography.com promises to deliver biographies from the web’s most important sites in all languages. It is indeed a thorough undertaking, each famous person linked to all the online references available.

Another quick and easy Who’s Who compilation is Whos2 , offering “2,943 famous people,characters and creatures, curious collections of famous people, plus a blog that covers “factual issues and oddities”.

One oddity is a collection of famous folks who lost their heads and their heads went on to become even more famous.

“A good juicy beheading is nothing unusual in world history. (Just ask Robespierre, who oversaw hundreds of beheadings and then went to the guillotine himself.) But a few separated skulls have gone on to take a special place in history all by themselves. Herewith we present Heads With a Life of Their Own.”

Since beheading is back in vogue with those barbarians still amongst us, a few more famous heads might soon join these discombobulated personages which include: Sir Walter Raleigh, Cicero,John the Baptist, Medusa and Sir Oliver Cromwell.

“The head of Oliver Cromwell — what a tale. Cromwell helped get King Charles I imprisoned, tried and finally beheaded in 1649, then ran Britain as Lord Protector until his own death in 1658. When Charles II reclaimed the monarchy a few years later, it was payback time. The new king had Cromwell’s body exhumed from Westminster Abbey, hung from a gallows, and then publicly beheaded. The head was then stuck atop a tall pole at Westminster Hall, where it remained for over 20 years. Eventually the head disappeared (some say it blew off during a storm), only to reappear in the 1770s in the possession of a thespian named Samuel Russell. The gruesome artifact passed from owner to owner to until the 1930s, when scientific analysis determined that the head really was that of Cromwell. (X-rays showed the stake still embedded in his skull.) In 1960 the head was given to Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, where it was finally laid to rest in an unmarked spot near the college chapel.
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