Intellect PlusVisual artists
833 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 14.
Australia's oldest university once had its own seat in parliamentFounded in 1850, the University of Sydney was built on a radical promise: entry by merit, not by church or class. It admitted women on equal terms from 1881, briefly elected its o…
Vanity Fair vanished inside Vogue for 47 years before coming backCondé Nast's glossy thrived in the 1920s, then the Depression killed it and Vogue absorbed it in 1936. The name lay dormant until a 1983 revival, which went on to unmask Watergate…
Vera Wang missed the Olympics as a skater, then dressed its championsAs a teenager Vera Wang chased a place on the American Olympic figure skating team and was crushed when she fell short. She became Vogue's youngest editor instead, opened a bridal…
The V&A began as a government fix for Britain's badly designed exportsIn 1832 officials worried that poor art teaching was hurting British manufacturing, so they opened a School of Design. That modest teaching collection grew into the world's larges…
Italy's grandest tragedian was thought too serious for comedy until 1958Vittorio Gassman staged Italy's first complete Hamlet and played Othello, yet film producers doubted he could be funny. Mario Monicelli's heist caper Big Deal on Madonna Street pr…
W. H. Auden married Thomas Mann's daughter to get her out of GermanyIn 1935, with the Nazis about to strip Erika Mann of her citizenship, Christopher Isherwood turned down her request for a marriage of convenience and pointed her to his friend Aud…
Before Walden's cabin came a Harvard student's shanty and a sister's letters from CubaThoreau's famous cabin had a forerunner: a shanty at Flint's Pond where he spent six weeks in 1837. Even earlier, Sophia Peabody's letters from Cuba were read aloud at seven-hour …
Turkey once knocked six zeros off its money in a single dayBy the early 2000s one old gold lira coin could fetch over 154 million paper lira, and Guinness named Turkey's currency the least valuable on earth. On 1 January 2005 the country …
A pub tape recorder and a runaway howitzer gave Britain The Goon ShowSpike Milligan first met Harry Secombe when Milligan's unit let a gun roll off a cliff onto Secombe's position. A few years later the pair, with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine,…
Thornton Wilder won Pulitzers for both fiction and drama, and called himself a teacher firstA bridge collapses in Peru and several strangers die. Thornton Wilder built a novel on asking why them, won a Pulitzer in 1928, and then collected two more for plays, Our Town amo…
The hill town whose name Copenhagen borrowed for its famous pleasure gardensTivoli sits where the Aniene river tumbles out of the Sabine Hills, 30 kilometres from Rome. Emperors built villas there, a captive queen of Palmyra lived out her exile there, and…
The Aztecs revered the Toltecs as master artisans; archaeologists suspect a legendTo the Aztecs, the Toltecs of Tula were the model of civilisation, and their very name came to mean artisan. Aztec chronicles even listed Toltec kings. Yet many scholars now treat…
A walk over the Alps helped turn terror into an aesthetic ideaAround 1700, three English writers crossed the Alps and came back unsettled: the peaks thrilled them and frightened them at once. Their letters helped launch the modern idea of th…
Israel's portable sanctuary had counterparts in Egyptian and Midianite tent shrinesIn the Hebrew Bible, God's home on earth was a tent the Israelites packed up and carried through the desert: gold-covered boards, dyed curtains and an inner room holding the Ark. …
Egg yolk paint outlasts oil because its colours never yellowFor most of European painting before 1500, the binder was egg yolk. Tempera dries fast, lays down in fine hatched strokes and, unlike oil, never darkens or yellows with age. Its o…
Three chapters of Matthew have produced dozens of rival readingsThe Sermon on the Mount fills only chapters 5 to 7 of Matthew, yet it holds the Beatitudes, the familiar Lord's Prayer and the Golden Rule. Tolstoy and Gandhi admired it, the Amer…
The shamisen buzzes on purpose, thanks to one deliberately low stringJapan's three-stringed shamisen has no frets, a drum for a body and a lowest string set slightly too low at the nut. That flaw is intentional: it produces sawari, a humming buzz p…
Economists describe the Sicilian Mafia as a business that sells protection and trustMembers of the Sicilian Mafia never called it the Mafia. Insiders used Cosa Nostra, our thing, and the popular label probably spread after an 1863 Palermo stage hit. The sociologi…
Freed Roman slaves became citizens, a rule that startled Greek observersSlavery underpinned Rome, from mine labourers to doctors and bankers. What set it apart was manumission: a freed slave could become a Roman citizen. By the 2nd century AD most fre…- Sotheby's sold books for over a century before it handled paintingsSotheby's began in London in 1744 as a bookseller's auction room, and handled Napoleon's exile library long before it bothered with fine art. Its first big painting sale, a Frans …
Vienna's cathedral roof is so steep that rain alone keeps it cleanSt. Stephen's in Vienna wears a roof of 230,000 glazed tiles, patterned with a Habsburg double eagle, pitched so steeply that rain washes it and snow rarely settles. When fire bro…
Stonewall Jackson entered West Point at the bottom and left it 17thThomas Jackson arrived at West Point in 1842 so poorly schooled he scraped through the entrance exams and started last in his class. Four years of relentless work lifted him to 17…
The Dutch fortress called the Swamp Dragon fell only after its marsh was pumped dryDen Bosch, home town of Hieronymus Bosch, sat inside a marsh so wet that ordinary siege works were useless. In 1629 Frederick Henry of Orange beat it anyway: he rerouted two river…
The Royal Albert Hall's echo took nearly a century to tameAt the Royal Albert Hall's first concert in 1871 the echo was so strong that Londoners joked it was the one venue where a British composer heard his work twice. An awning, alumini…
Cinco de Mayo marks a Mexican win over Napoleon III's invading armyIn 1862 France invaded Mexico, officially to collect unpaid debts, really to install a European monarch and check American power. A Mexican victory at Puebla on 5 May stalled the …
Under early English sedition law, telling the truth made the offence worseIn Elizabethan England, a seditious statement being true was no defence at all. Judges treated accuracy as an aggravating factor, reasoning that true words stir more unrest than l…
A mugging in Los Angeles helped push Rick Owens to build his empire in ParisRick Owens grew up in a conservative Catholic home in small-town California, learned his trade copying designer clothes, and became famous when Kate Moss wore one of his leather j…
Robert Moses never won an election, yet he rebuilt New York around the carAt one point Robert Moses held as many as 12 official titles at once. He never won a single election, but bridge and tunnel tolls under his control paid for highways, parks and be…
Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, then rubbed it outIn 1953 Robert Rauschenberg persuaded Willem de Kooning to hand over a drawing so he could erase it, and called the result art. The Texan who dropped out of pharmacology went on t…
Rome, Open City was shot on black-market film just months after liberationRoberto Rossellini began his career making films for Mussolini's navy, then made Rome, Open City with borrowed money and black-market stock as soon as the Nazis left. It turned hi…
Rockefeller Center was meant to be a new home for the Metropolitan OperaMidtown's Art Deco showpiece began as a scheme to give the Metropolitan Opera a new house. The 1929 crash killed that plan, so John D. Rockefeller Jr. pivoted to radio, luring RCA…
The director of Notting Hill walked away from a James Bond filmRoger Michell made Notting Hill, which became the biggest British box-office success ever, yet he quit Quantum of Solace after months of meetings produced no usable script. A dipl…
Rosalynn Carter sat in on Cabinet meetings and made mental health her causeRosalynn Carter declared she would not be a traditional first lady, and she meant it. She attended Cabinet meetings, travelled to Latin America as her husband's envoy, and spent f…
For four years, a cast-iron spire made Rouen Cathedral the world's tallest buildingRouen Cathedral took more than eight centuries to build and rebuild, and its three towers each wear a different style. Vikings raided it, Rollo was baptised in it, Monet painted i…
Why sculptors carved battles into walls instead of making statuesA relief is sculpture that never leaves its background. That sounds limiting, yet it lets artists cram crowds, horses and whole stories onto a wall, avoids fragile stone ankles, a…- A fire in 1720 split Rennes into a stone north and timbered southBrittany's capital began as a Gaulish village called Condate. A blaze in 1720 gutted its wooden medieval core, and only the wealthier north was rebuilt in stone on a grid. Centuri…
A murder plot inside Florence Cathedral that made the Medici strongerOn a Sunday in April 1478, assassins struck at Lorenzo de' Medici and his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo. Giuliano died, Lorenzo escaped to the sacristy, and the c…
Pomerania, the Baltic 'land by the sea' that Poles and Germans define differentlyStretching along the southern Baltic from near Rügen to the Vistula, Pomerania holds Germany's biggest island, Poland's biggest island and the port of Gdańsk. Its Slavic name simp…
The royal duke who married twice against the law and united English FreemasonryGeorge III's sixth son skipped the army, backed Catholic emancipation and Jewish civil rights, and wed twice without the permission the law demanded. Augustus Frederick, Duke of S…
Queen Anne's Danish husband wanted a quiet life and got a revolutionPrince George of Denmark married the future Queen Anne to help contain Dutch sea power, which made William of Orange loathe him. He longed for domestic calm, yet deserted his fath…
The world's oldest digital library began with one student typing the DeclarationOn July 4, 1971, a University of Illinois student named Michael Hart typed the US Declaration of Independence into a mainframe linked to the early ARPANET and sent it to other use…
Romain Gary won France's top literary prize twice by becoming someone elseAlready a Goncourt winner, Romain Gary took the prize again as Émile Ajar, a persona the jury never connected to him. Pseudonyms have hidden brewers' secrets, women novelists, the…
Patricia Highsmith wrote comic books for years before Tom Ripley made her nameBefore she created Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith spent 1942 to 1949 writing comic-book scripts she privately dismissed as hack work. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was sn…
Occitania is named after the way its people once said yesThe name Occitania glues together òc, the Occitan word for yes, and Aquitania, the Roman label for much of the region. It covers a sweep of southern France plus slivers of Spain, …
Britain's Order of the Bath was partly invented to buy political loyaltyGeorge I founded the Order of the Bath on 18 May 1725, dressing it in medieval ritual about knights bathing to purify themselves. Behind the pageantry sat a practical bargain: Rob…
One backward glance cost Orpheus his wife, and Plato called him a cowardOrpheus sang so movingly that Hades, lord of the dead, agreed to release his wife Eurydice on one condition: walk ahead and never look back. Hearing no footsteps behind him, Orphe…
Moscow demolished a cathedral for a palace that was never finishedThe Palace of the Soviets was meant to stand 416 metres tall, topped by a 100-metre Lenin, with a hall seating over 20,000. To clear the ground, Moscow blew up the Cathedral of Ch…
Florence's town hall may hide a lost Leonardo behind its wallsFlorence's Palazzo Vecchio began in 1299 as a defensible seat for the city's magistrates, built over the razed homes of a rebel family. It has jailed Cosimo de' Medici and Savonar…
A stonemason's son from Padua shaped country houses from England to MonticelloAndrea Palladio, born in 1508, designed villas in the Veneto whose rooms followed simple ratios like 3:4 and 4:5. Two centuries later his symmetrical, temple-fronted houses were b…
Pastoral poetry was written for city people dreaming of shepherdsSince classical antiquity, poets have sold townspeople a fantasy of shepherds lounging in Arcadia, courting in a lovely landscape with barely a chore in sight. The tradition runs …
Japan's public broadcaster was the first anywhere to air high-definition and 8KNHK began as three radio stations in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya that merged in August 1926, deliberately patterned on Britain's BBC. It went on to carry the Emperor's surrender broad…
Before noise music had a name, a Futurist built machines to make itIn 1913 the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo argued that industry had trained modern ears for richer sounds, then built his own noise-making instruments to prove it. None survive. Y…
Numidia: the Berber kingdom whose horsemen helped Rome break CarthageTwo rival Berber states once split the land that is now northern Algeria. Then a Carthage-educated prince named Masinissa switched sides, fought guerrilla-style in the mountains, …
Water lilies are ancient, yet their showiest blooms are the newer onesWith their big, many-petalled blooms, water lilies were long taken as a living picture of the first flowers. Genetics confirmed they branch off near the base of the flowering-plan…
Morgan le Fay started as Arthur's healer before becoming his enemyThe first written Morgan was no villain. Around 1150, Geoffrey of Monmouth made her the chief of nine magical sisters on the Isle of Apples, where the dying Arthur was carried aft…
Naïve painters know the rules of perspective and ignore them anywayNaïve art is made by people with no formal art training, yet its creators usually know how professionals paint. They simply cannot, or will not, follow the old rules: distant obje…
America's National Gallery was born from paintings the Soviets quietly soldIn 1930 and 1931, Andrew Mellon's trust bought 21 paintings from the Hermitage as the Soviet Union sold off treasures, including Raphael's Alba Madonna. Those works helped seed th…
Microsoft froze the .NET Framework in 2019, yet Windows still ships itThe .NET Framework powered a generation of Windows software, letting code written in one language call code from another inside a virtual machine. Microsoft stopped adding feature…- Every ad agency turned Malcolm Gladwell down, so he became a journalist insteadMalcolm Gladwell wanted a career in advertising, and not one agency would hire him. He drifted into small conservative magazines, then The Washington Post, then The New Yorker in …
Marbella grew almost ninefold in half a century, fed by sun and tourismAround 10,000 people lived in Marbella in 1950. By 2023 the census counted 156,295, after growth of 897 percent between 1950 and 2001 alone. Wedged between the Mediterranean and t…