Intellect PlusWriters
1,873 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 28 of 32.
Arnold Rothstein ran crime like a corporation, then refused to pay a poker debtArnold Rothstein, nicknamed The Brain, was a New York gambler who saw what Prohibition could offer before almost anyone else. He is credited with turning organised crime into a bu…
Asghar Farhadi turns ordinary family quarrels into moral thrillersAsghar Farhadi's films rarely involve villains. A couple argues over a divorce, a holiday trip goes wrong, a stranger's attack unsettles a marriage, and the audience is left unsur…
Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels while holding down a full-time Post Office jobA bullied schoolboy and hopeless junior clerk, Anthony Trollope was rescued by a posting nobody wanted: postal surveyor in rural Ireland. There he found prosperity, fox hunting, a…
Agatha Christie called And Then There Were None her hardest book to writeTen strangers, an island off Devon, a nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom and ten little figurines that vanish one by one. With more than 100 million copies sold by 2007, Agatha…
André Gide's trip to the Congo helped turn French opinion against colonial exploitationIn 1926 the celebrated novelist André Gide set off through French Equatorial Africa and came back with a journal describing villagers forced into the forest for weeks to gather ru…
Angers, once the Black City of slate roofs, now calls itself the City of FlowersSlate from a nearby quarry once darkened so many roofs in Angers that people called it the Black City. Today the old Plantagenet stronghold on the edge of the Loire Valley leads E…
The shy woman who invented the Gothic thriller then vanished from public lifeAnn Radcliffe was the most popular novelist of her day, among the best paid of the eighteenth century, and so private that one reviewer said nothing was known of her except the na…
Joe Wright staged Tolstoy's Anna Karenina almost entirely inside a theatreInstead of sweeping across Russian landscapes, Joe Wright's 2012 Anna Karenina plays most of its action on and around a theatre stage, as if high society were a performance watche…
A Byzantine princess who lost the throne wrote history's key account of the First Crusade eraAnna Komnene was presented with a crown at birth and raised as heir to Byzantium, until a baby brother displaced her. Whether she then plotted against him is still argued. What is…
Anne Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to watch the Wall come downIn November 1989 a young Economist correspondent based in Warsaw got in a car and headed for Berlin as the Wall fell. Anne Applebaum spent the following decades chronicling commun…
In Ancona, the only Italian city where the sun rises and sets over the seaAncona curls into the Adriatic like a bent arm, which is exactly what its Greek name means: elbow. That shape gives it a rare trick. It is the one city in Italy, and among very fe…
The sage Agastya gave his name to the second brightest star in India's skyAgastya is a Vedic hymn-writer, the legendary father of Siddha medicine, the supposed author of the first Tamil grammar and a guru in medieval Javanese texts. In Indian tradition …
Aix-en-Provence owes its name to Roman springs and a consul called SextiusWarm mineral springs drew a Roman consul here in 123 BC, and the town he founded carried his name: Aquae Sextiae, the waters of Sextius. Two thousand years later Aix is a city of …
Wallenstein grew too powerful for the emperor he saved, and was killed for itA poor Protestant noble from Bohemia, Albrecht von Wallenstein converted, married money and raised an army of 50,000 men for the Catholic emperor. He became one of the richest men…- The army knew Alfred Dreyfus was innocent and left him on Devil's IslandIn 1894 a Jewish artillery captain was convicted of spying for Germany and shipped to a penal colony off South America. The real spy was another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhaz…
Ali Smith abandoned a Cambridge doctorate because she kept writing playsSebastian Barry called Ali Smith Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting. Her route there ran through an Inverness council house, jobs cleaning lettuce and writing adverts, and a PhD…
A newspaper once called Alice Munro the least praised good writer; then came the NobelIn 1961 the Vancouver Sun profiled a young mother under the headline Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories. Alice Munro wrote in stolen moments while her husband minded the …
Why British ambassadors are still sent to a royal court, not a governmentEnvoys to London are formally accredited to the Court of St James's, a relic of the idea that an ambassador is the monarch's personal stand-in. Commonwealth countries, sharing a h…- Rearrange William Shakespeare and you get I am a weakish spellerAn anagram reuses every letter of a word or phrase exactly once, and the best ones comment on their source. Shakespeare hides a weakish speller; Tom Marvolo Riddle becomes I am Lo…
Corinth's clay and stone made it rich long before Paul wrote to itSitting on the narrow neck of land between the Peloponnese and mainland Greece, Corinth grew into one of the biggest Greek cities, home to some 90,000 people by 400 BC. Rome razed…- Adrien Brody gave up his flat and car to play The PianistTo become Władysław Szpilman, Adrien Brody vanished from public life for months, sold his car, surrendered his apartment and practised Chopin four hours a day while shedding 30 po…
A British ultimatum helped topple Portugal's centuries-old monarchyIn January 1890 Britain ordered Portuguese forces out of the land between Angola and Mozambique, and Lisbon meekly complied. Many Portuguese saw a national humiliation and blamed …
Fellini nearly abandoned 8½ until his own block became the storyIn April 1962, with sets built and actors cast, Federico Fellini sat down to write his producer a letter admitting he had lost his film. A crew member interrupted, inviting him to…
Winnie-the-Pooh's name came from a zoo bear and a swanChristopher Robin Milne's teddy was first called Edward. After the boy fell for Winnie, a tame Canadian black bear at London Zoo named after Winnipeg, the toy became Winnie. The P…
Pushkin's African great-grandfather became a general of imperial RussiaAs a boy, Abram Gannibal was seized by Ottoman forces, then bought through a bribe and sent to Peter the Great as a court curiosity. Peter became his godfather instead. Gannibal w…- The foreign film Oscar is really about language, not nationalityHollywood's award for international cinema has little to do with where a film comes from and everything to do with what its characters speak. A Nigerian entry was disqualified for…
In Hebrew, Adam is both a man's name and a word for humankindGenesis uses the Hebrew word adam in two ways. In its first chapter it means humanity, created male and female together; in the second it names a single man shaped from dust, with…
The 14th century killed tens of millions and still launched new empiresBetween 1301 and 1400, plague, famine, war and conquest are estimated to have taken more than 45 million lives across Europe and the Mongol world. Yet the same hundred years saw T…
Five years for Madame Bovary—and a trial for immoralityGustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Rouen-born son of a hospital surgeon, became French realism’s emblem. Madame Bovary took five years, appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1856, and land…
Yoknapatawpha County won Faulkner the 1949 NobelWilliam Faulkner (25 September 1897 – 6 July 1962) mapped fictional Yoknapatawpha County onto real Mississippi clay. Raised in Oxford after a New Albany birth, he joined the Royal…
Heminges and Condell saved the plays in the 1623 FolioWilliam Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) of Stratford remains English drama’s measuring stick. Married at eighteen to Anne Hathaway, father of Susanna and twins Hamn…
Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge lit the Romantic fuseWilliam Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850), with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, opened English Romanticism through Lyrical Ballads (1798). The Prelude—revised for decades and iss…
Nigeria’s first literature Nobel still writes as witnessAkinwande Oluwole Soyinka, born 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, is Nigeria’s playwright-poet who has issued novels, story collections, verse, some twenty-five plays, and memoirs. Yoruba…
An orphaned Osaka novelist perfected hush on the pageYasunari Kawabata (11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) wrote spare, shaded Japanese prose that won him the Nobel. Orphaned by age four and raised by grandparents in Osaka, he met his si…
A Trinidad childhood fed a Booker-winning global eyeV. S. Naipaul, born in 1932 in a Trinidad sugar town to a family of indentured Indian migrants, became a British writer of more than thirty books. Comic island novels gave way to …
Woolf turned Bloomsbury talk into modernist interiorsAdeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) helped invent modernist fiction’s stream of consciousness. After her father’s 1904 death she moved into bohem…
Futurism’s loudest poet died by his own hand in 1930Vladimir Mayakovsky (19 July 1893 – 14 April 1930) was Russian futurism’s booming poet, playwright, and poster artist. He cheered Bolshevik ideology and Lenin yet fought the state…
An Anglo-Irish poet midwifed a national theatreWilliam Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) stood at the center of twentieth-century literature and the Irish Literary Revival. Protestant, Dublin-born, Sligo-haunted, h…
Leaves of Grass made America hear itself chantingWalt Whitman (31 May 1819 – 26 March 1892) quit school at eleven for printing shops and classrooms, then rewrote American verse in long, bodily lines. Leaves of Grass kept expandi…
A busy Edinburgh lawyer invented the historical novel boomSir Walter Scott (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) packed Clerk of Session duties and Selkirkshire shrievalty alongside the Waverley novels that remade European fiction. Tory E…
Tang China’s painter-poet signed himself as VimalakirtiWang Wei (699–761), courtesy name Mojie, was a middle Tang musician, painter, poet, and official. Famous for fusing landscape painting with spare nature verse, he signed works Wan…
Catherine Blake printed and coloured a “mad” genius’s booksWilliam Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) died obscure and was later crowned a Romantic prophet of word and image. Neighbors called him mad; posterity praised the mystical…
Wessex novelist who insisted he was mainly a poetThomas Hardy (1840–1928), Victorian realist after George Eliot and touched by Wordsworthian Romanticism, scorned much Victorian social hypocrisy. Famous for novels such as Far fro…
Hanseatic Nobel novelist who wrote in exileThomas Mann (1875–1955), 1929 Literature Nobel laureate, wrote ironic symbolic epics of bourgeois and artist psyches. Buddenbrooks (1901) sketched his Hanseatic clan; The Magic Mo…
Lord Chancellor who died refusing Henry’s churchSir Thomas More (1478–1535), Renaissance humanist, lawyer, and Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor (1529–1532), wrote Utopia and fought Reformation theology. He refused to accept Henry a…
Lorain’s Nobel novelist who began with The Bluest EyeToni Morrison (1931–2019), born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Bluest Eye (1970) opened a career crowned by Song of Solomon (1977 National Book…
Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire poet who joined the ResistanceTristan Tzara (1896–1963), born Samy Rosenstock in Romania, became French avant-garde poetry’s Dada spark at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Waag hall during World War I. Paris afte…
Varkari saint whose abhangas scolded caste powerTukaram, seventeenth-century Marathi Varkari saint also called Tuka or Tukoba, devoted himself to Vithoba and wrote abhanga lyrics still sung across Maharashtra. Born Tukaram Bolh…- Rama’s poet who made Ramlila possible in HindiTulsidas (1511–1623), born Rambola Dubey, was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint-poet of Rama whose works reshape North Indian culture through Ramlila, music, and vernacular speech. He l…
Semiotician whose Name of the Rose went globalUmberto Eco (1932–2016)—medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist—reached English readers mainly through The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery laced with signs t…
The Jungle’s muckraker who nearly governed CaliforniaUpton Sinclair (1878–1968) wrote nearly one hundred books as muckraker and activist, running for California governor as Democrat in 1934. The Jungle (1906) exposed meatpacking fil…
Anthropologists’ daughter who remapped speculative fictionUrsula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) built the Hainish science-fiction universe and Earthsea fantasy after publishing from 1959. Born in Berkeley to anthropologists Theodora and Alfred K…- Romantic who wrote Notre-Dame and Les MisérablesVictor Hugo (1802–1885), French Romantic poet, novelist, playwright, and politician, is world-famous for the Notre-Dame novel of 1831 and for Les Misérables three decades later. F…
Augustan poet of Eclogues, Georgics, and AeneidVirgil (70–19 BC), Publius Vergilius Maro, wrote Latin’s core trio—Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid—for the Augustan age. Already a classic in life, he displaced Ennius in schoo…
St. Louis modernist who became a British subjectT. S. Eliot (1888–1965) remade English modernist poetry with bleak diction and fractured verse, winning the 1948 Nobel Prize. Born to St. Louis Boston Brahmins, he moved to Englan…
Six Dynasties recluse who made farming a poetic idealTao Yuanming (365–427), also Tao Qian, was a Six Dynasties poet-official who spent much of life farming and reading in rural reclusion. His plain style bucked contemporary literar…- Serf painter-poet who became Ukraine’s national voiceTaras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist, and national figure born to serfs under Russian rule. Art talent won him Imperial Academy fellowship in Saint Petersburg…
Mississippi-born playwright of Glass Menagerie fameTennessee Williams (1911–1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams III, stands with O’Neill and Miller atop twentieth-century American drama. The Glass Menagerie in 1944 broke through af…
Carthaginian slave whose six comedies schooled EuropePublius Terentius Afer (c. 195/185–c. 159 BC) wrote six Roman comedies adapted from Menander and Apollodorus—all surviving complete. Ancients said he was born in Carthage, enslave…- Hungary's national poet vanished into battle fogSándor Petőfi (1823–1849) wrote the Nemzeti dal that helped spark Hungary's 1848 revolution against the Austrian Empire, then vanished at the Battle of Segesvár. His body was neve…