Intellect PlusWriters
1,873 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 25 of 32.
Johnson, Petrov and O'Conor all hide a father's name inside themRodríguez began as son of Rodrigo, Powell as ap Hywel, and MacAllister as son of Alistair. Across much of the world, naming a child after the father's first name came long before …
Patti Smith froze mid-song at the Nobel ceremony, apologised, and finishedStanding in for Bob Dylan in Stockholm in 2016, Patti Smith lost her place in A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, admitted she was nervous and started again to roaring applause. It fitted…
A novel about a man with the world's best nose and no smell of his ownJean-Baptiste Grenouille can pick out the faintest odour across great distances, yet he himself gives off nothing at all. Patrick Süskind built his 1985 novel Perfume around that …
Sarah Polley turned the secret of her own paternity into an acclaimed documentaryAs a child, Sarah Polley was teased by her siblings for looking nothing like her dad. As an adult she learned why: her biological father was the film producer Harry Gulkin, with w…
Rome kept its treasury in the temple of a god whose statue wore woollen fettersFor most of the year, the cult statue of Saturn in Rome had its feet bound with wool. Only during his December festival, the Saturnalia, were the bindings removed, and the city br…
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel while on holiday and nobody could reach himWhen the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Seamus Heaney, he was travelling in Greece with his wife. Reporters and even his own children failed to contact him for two days, t…
Sheikh simply means elder, yet it names emirs, mystics and merchant families alikeAt root, the Arabic word sheikh comes from a three-letter stem tied to growing old. That humble meaning now stretches remarkably far: it is borne by Gulf royals, Sufi masters, Som…
Moscow's busiest airport began life as a Soviet air force baseSheremetyevo was meant for warplanes. A 1953 Soviet decree ordered a central air force airfield outside Moscow, and it opened in 1957 for the revolution's 40th anniversary. Within…
China's first great history weighed up to sixty kilograms in bambooSima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian runs to roughly 526,500 characters, longer than the Hebrew Bible. Written on bamboo slips bundled in groups of about thirty, the origina…
Live television taught Sidney Lumet to shoot fast, and Hollywood never slowed himBefore his first feature, Sidney Lumet had directed roughly 200 television episodes, many broadcast live, where there was no time for second thoughts. That lightning pace followed…
Romain Gary won France's top literary prize twice by inventing a second authorThe rules of France's most prestigious literary prize forbid winning it twice. Romain Gary managed it anyway: in 1973 he began writing in a new style as Émile Ajar, even getting h…
The first Grail hero failed because he was too polite to ask a questionLong before Galahad claimed it, the Grail quest belonged to Perceval, a boy raised in a forest who knew nothing of knighthood. At the castle of a wounded Fisher King he watched a …
Brazil received nearly half of all Africans forced across the AtlanticOf roughly 12 million Africans shipped in bondage to the Americas, about 5.5 million were taken to Brazil, more than to any other country. Sugar, gold, diamonds and coffee were al…
Sorrento once had a temple to the Sirens, unique in the Greek worldSorrento, perched above the Bay of Naples, was known in antiquity for wine and fish rather than the lemons that now flavour its limoncello; citrus had not yet reached Italy. Legen…
Southwark's firm ground is the reason London stands where it doesTwo thousand years ago the south bank of the Thames was mostly marshy tidal islands, except for one firm strip of ground. Roman engineers built their bridge there around 43 AD, an…
The first sovereign wealth fund was set up by Texas to pay for schoolsSovereign wealth funds sound like a Gulf invention, but the idea began in 1854 with a Texas fund for public education. Kuwait launched the first national one in 1953 from oil mone…- Spain's original plan to invade England needed 556 ships and 94,222 menPhilip II's first blueprint for conquering England was so vast, with over 94,000 men and a cost beyond even Spain's treasury, that it was abandoned. The scaled-down Armada of 1588…
Four Latin letters have signed off Rome's official business for two thousand yearsSPQR, short for the Senate and People of Rome, was the Roman state's signature on coins, monuments and public inscriptions. The four letters outlived the Republic, the Empire and …
Stalin reportedly brushed off the word Stalinism as dangerous flatteryWhen his associate Lazar Kaganovich proposed swapping the slogan Long Live Leninism for Long Live Stalinism, Stalin reportedly called it excessive, suspecting such praise could on…- The songwriter who made Swanee River famous barely set foot in the SouthStephen Foster wrote more than 200 songs, many steeped in Southern scenery, yet he never lived in the South and went there only once, on his honeymoon. He died in New York at 37 w…
The Vicar of Dibley's choirmaster also runs one of Britain's boldest theatre companiesFilm audiences know Simon McBurney as a spymaster in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the voice of the house-elf Kreacher. On stage he is the founder of Complicité, a company whose sh…
Sinclair Lewis turned down a Pulitzer, then became America's first Nobel literature laureateWhen Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize, Sinclair Lewis refused it, still stung that Main Street had been passed over. Five years later he became the first American to win the Nobe…
Sylvia Plath's only novel first appeared under the name Victoria LucasIn 1963 a British publisher released a novel about a gifted student who wins a glamorous New York magazine internship and then slides into depression. Its author was listed as Vic…
Poe's The Black Cat turns a hidden crime into a confession by howlEdgar Allan Poe's narrator is sure he has committed the perfect crime. Police have searched his cellar and found nothing. Then, boasting about how solid the walls are, he taps the…
How Christopher Nolan was coaxed back to finish his Batman trilogyAfter The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan was reluctant to make another Batman film. He agreed only once he, his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer found an ending worth telling. …
Oscar Hammerstein called teenage Sondheim's first musical the worst thing he'd readAt 15, Stephen Sondheim proudly showed his school musical to his neighbour and surrogate father, Oscar Hammerstein II. The verdict: terrible, though not untalented. They spent the…
Storm and Stress: when young Goethe and Schiller rebelled against reasonFor roughly fifteen years from the late 1760s, German writers traded Enlightenment balance for raw feeling, revenge plots and heroes answerable to nobody. The movement took its na…
Why Malevich hung a black square where Russians kept their holiest iconIn 1915 Kazimir Malevich unveiled a plain black square and placed it high in a gallery corner, the spot Orthodox households reserve for their main icon. The gesture announced Supr…
Susanna Clarke spent ten spare-time years on a novel that fetched £1 millionWhile editing cookbooks in Cambridge, Susanna Clarke wrote a vast novel about English magicians in stolen early-morning hours, never sure it would be finished or published. A deca…
Sydney Sweeney pitched her parents a five-year business plan to start actingAs a child in Spokane, Sydney Sweeney wanted to act after auditioning as an extra for a local independent film. To win her parents over, she handed them a five-year business plan.…
Stallone drafted Rocky in three days after watching a long-shot title fightOn March 24, 1975, a struggling actor watched journeyman Chuck Wepner take Muhammad Ali deep into their fight. Three days later Sylvester Stallone had a first draft of Rocky. He i…
Tekken's family feud has run three decades without a single rebootMost long video game series eventually wipe the slate clean. Tekken never did. Since Namco's 1994 original, its brawlers have fought over control of the Mishima Zaibatsu while fat…
Stephen Graham's dyslexia means his wife reads his scripts firstThe Kirkby-born actor behind This Is England's Combo and Netflix's Adolescence cannot easily read the scripts he is offered, so his wife, actor Hannah Walters, reads them and help…
Thelonious Monk had two left hands, according to one Harlem record dealerA Harlem record dealer once told Monk's champion Lorraine Gordon that the pianist couldn't play and had two left hands. Monk's jagged melodies and sudden silences sold poorly for …
Neil Hannon's one-man band that also wrote the Father Ted themeThe Divine Comedy has had many players since 1989, but only one constant: Neil Hannon, a Northern Irish songwriter who sometimes plays everything except drums and orchestra. Betwe…
Arundhati Roy sketched her Booker-winning novel like a building before writing itArundhati Roy bought a computer in New Delhi in 1992, wanting work she could do alone, and did not realise at first she was writing a novel. Four years later she had The God of Sm…
How Baz Luhrmann turned Sydney into Long Island for his Great GatsbyBaz Luhrmann's 2013 Great Gatsby was filmed not on Long Island but around Sydney, where a business school played Gatsby's mansion and its palm trees were digitally erased. Critics…
How Solzhenitsyn hid The Gulag Archipelago in pieces across MoscowAleksandr Solzhenitsyn never kept his account of the Soviet labour camps in one place. Owning it could mean years in prison, so he scattered sections among friends and worked on o…
Margaret Atwood insisted almost nothing in The Handmaid's Tale was inventedMargaret Atwood carried newspaper clippings to interviews about The Handmaid's Tale to prove a point: nearly everything in her 1985 dystopia had already happened somewhere. Its Re…
The Canterbury school that claims fourteen centuries of unbroken lessonsThe King's School in Canterbury traces its teaching back to AD 597, when St Augustine arrived to bring Christianity back to Kent, making it arguably the oldest continuously runnin…
Laurence Sterne's comic novel whose narrator takes three volumes to be bornTristram Shandy sets out to tell his life story and doesn't manage to get himself born until volume three. Laurence Sterne's nine-volume comedy, issued between 1759 and 1767, turn…
Leslie Howard refused to make The Petrified Forest without Humphrey BogartWarner Bros. wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the gangster Duke Mantee in its 1936 film of The Petrified Forest. Leslie Howard, who held final say over the script, said he would …
How Anne Frank's diary became letters to an imaginary friend named KittyAnne Frank picked out a red checked autograph book the day before her 13th birthday in June 1942. Weeks later her family vanished into a hidden annex in Amsterdam. By the time she…
Britain's only republic lasted under six years and ended with Cromwell's sonFrom December 1653 to May 1659, England, Scotland and Ireland were a single republic ruled by a Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell held the post for life, divided England among milit…
Ishiguro's perfect butler realises too late what his loyalty cost himIn 1956, Stevens, a butler of the old school, borrows his American employer's car and drives toward Cornwall to see a former housekeeper he hopes might return to work. Along the w…
Yeats wrote The Second Coming while his wife recovered from pandemic fluIn 1919, with Europe exhausted by war, Ireland entering its War of Independence and his pregnant wife Georgie barely surviving influenza, W. B. Yeats wrote a short poem about civi…
Turner added a storm to the Zong atrocity, which really happened in calm seasJ. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship shows a blood-red sunset, a typhoon rolling in and a vessel sailing away from people it has cast into the sea. It recalls the Zong case of 1781. T…- Atwood's sequel reveals the Handmaid's Tale villain Aunt Lydia as a secret moleThirty-four years after The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood returned to Gilead with The Testaments, set fifteen years later. Its most surprising voice belongs to Aunt Lydia, the …
An English immigrant taught Americans to see their wilderness as EdenThomas Cole grew up amid the smoky mill towns of industrial Lancashire, emigrated to the United States at seventeen, and taught himself to paint. His brooding views of the Catskil…
Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, spent seven years as a womanIn Greek myth, Tiresias struck a pair of mating snakes on Mount Cyllene and was instantly turned into a woman. Seven years later a second encounter with snakes changed him back. T…
Tom Stoppard fled the Nazis as a toddler and became Britain's wittiest playwrightTomáš Sträussler left Czechoslovakia on the very day the Nazis invaded in 1939, spent his boyhood in Singapore and the Himalayas, and arrived in England at eight speaking only Eng…
The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in a Bedfordshire jail and never out of printJohn Bunyan, a nonconformist preacher, started his allegory behind bars for holding unlicensed religious services. Published in 1678, The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated in…
Camus built The Plague on an Algerian city's real brushes with epidemicAlbert Camus set his 1947 novel The Plague in Oran, a French Algerian port sealed off by quarantine as rats die in the streets. He drew on a cholera outbreak that killed a large s…
Edinburgh's anatomy school got bodies through a secret tunnel Burke and Hare usedVoltaire called Edinburgh a hotbed of genius, and its university was a hub of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also had darker corners: corpses for dissection arrived through a hidd…- The University of London began as an exam board, not a place to studyFor its first six decades the University of London taught nobody. It set exams and awarded degrees, eventually to anyone who passed, wherever they had studied. That odd start made…
The French president who invited Paris garbage collectors to breakfast at the ÉlyséeValéry Giscard d'Estaing entered the Élysée at 48 wanting to seem less like a monarch. He rode the Métro, dined monthly with ordinary families and hosted Paris refuse collectors f…- A student who never died helped topple Czechoslovakia's communist governmentAfter riot police beat students in Prague on 17 November 1989, word spread that one of them, Martin Šmíd, had been killed. No such death had happened. The rumour, begun by an inju…
Tony Benn fought for the right to stop being a viscountWhen his father died in 1960, Tony Benn inherited a peerage he did not want, and with it lost his seat in the Commons. He campaigned until Parliament passed the Peerage Act 1963 l…
The first Moomin was an ugly doodle mocking the philosopher KantAfter losing an argument about Immanuel Kant with her brother, the young Tove Jansson drew the ugliest creature she could imagine on the family outhouse wall and labelled it Kant.…
A Tufts professor wired up a working telephone before Bell's patentIn 1875 Tufts physicist Amos Dolbear strung a working telephone line from his campus lab to his house, two years before Alexander Graham Bell received his patent. The college also…