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1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 32.

  1. 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…
  2. 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…
  3. 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…
  4. 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…
  5. 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 …
  6. 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 …
  7. 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…
  8. 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…
  9. 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…
  10. 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 …
  11. 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…
  12. 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…
  13. 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…
  14. 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…
  15. 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 …
  16. 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…
  17. 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…
  18. 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…
  19. 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…
  20. 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…
  21. 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…
  22. Yeshiva means sitting, and its study partners are named for friendshipA yeshiva takes its name from the Hebrew for sitting, the act of settling down to learn. Its most distinctive habit is the chavrusa, a pair of students arguing through a Talmud pa…
  23. Trier, the Moselle city that once served as a Roman capitalA quiet wine town near Luxembourg with about 110,000 people was, in the 4th century, among the largest cities of the Roman Empire and a home of western emperors. Trier still carri…
  24. Canada needed a new law before secret watching became a crimeIn 1950 Canada's Supreme Court ruled that judges could not turn secret watching into a crime by calling it a breach of the peace; only Parliament could. It took until November 200…
  25. The Bible contains a book of frank love poetry, and rabbis argued over itNestled in the Hebrew Bible is a poem in which two lovers trade compliments, chase each other through city streets at night and invite one another into a garden of fruits. God is …
  26. Tefillin hold 3,188 handwritten letters, and one mistake ruins the setThe small black leather boxes strapped to the arm and forehead by observant Jewish men at weekday morning prayer carry four passages of scripture, penned by a scribe in strict ord…
  27. The Da Vinci Code's secret society was invented in the 1950sDan Brown's 2003 thriller opens with a page declaring the Priory of Sion a real society founded in 1099. It sold 80 million copies and convinced many readers. Yet the son of one o…
  28. Scorsese took 26 years to get his Jesus film onto the screenMartin Scorsese was handed Nikos Kazantzakis's novel as a student in 1962, finally read it a decade later, and saw Paramount scrap his first attempt in 1983 amid budget worries an…
  29. Saint Thecla baptised herself, and an early church writer was not amusedIn a second-century tale, a young noblewoman named Thecla abandons her fiancé to follow Paul, survives a burning and wild beasts, and plunges into a pool to baptise herself. Her s…
  30. A Hindu monk told Thomas Merton to go back to ChristianityIn 1938 a restless Columbia graduate met a visiting Hindu monk and expected to be steered toward Hinduism. Instead Mahanambrata Brahmachari told him to read Augustine and The Imit…
  31. Doubting Thomas, the apostle whose name simply means twinThomas refused to believe in the risen Jesus until he could put his finger in the nail marks, and the phrase doubting Thomas has stuck ever since. Yet Christians in Kerala remembe…
  32. Transubstantiation was named a thousand years after the Last SupperCatholic teaching holds that at Mass the whole substance of bread and wine becomes Christ's body and blood while taste, colour and texture stay exactly the same. The New Testament…
  33. Up to 20,000 people camped for six days at Cane Ridge in 1801In August 1801, a Presbyterian communion gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, swelled into what is often called America's first camp meeting. Perhaps 20,000 settlers came for six da…
  34. Seven's bleak ending survived only because Fincher got the wrong scriptProducers forced writer Andrew Kevin Walker to replace the brutal ending of his thriller Seven with something more conventional. Then David Fincher was accidentally sent the origi…
  35. The word archangel never appears in the Hebrew BibleChristians often speak of seven archangels, yet the Old Testament never uses the word, and the New Testament uses it only twice, both times for Michael. The number seven comes mos…
  36. The seven deadly sins began as eight, and the Bible lists none of themYou won't find the seven deadly sins listed anywhere in the Bible. They grew out of early monastic thinking, starting with a fourth-century monk's catalogue of eight temptations. …
  37. Rome's youngest sole emperor took power at 13, steered by his grandmotherIn March 222 the army hailed 13-year-old Severus Alexander as Roman emperor. His grandmother Julia Maesa had engineered it, persuading the unpopular Elagabalus to adopt his cousin…
  38. Shtetl just means little town, yet it names a vanished worldIn Yiddish a city was a shtot and a village a dorf; a shtetl, the diminutive, was a little town. Across Eastern Europe these market towns held most of the region's Jews and a dist…
  39. The Bible never names Mary's mother; Anne comes from a second-century textSaint Anne, grandmother of Jesus in Christian tradition, is absent from the canonical gospels. Her name first appears in the Gospel of James, written around the middle of the seco…
  40. Was Joseph really a carpenter? The Greek word is far broaderThe gospels call Joseph a tekton, a word from the same root as technology. It could describe a builder in wood, iron or stone, and some scholars suggest a skilled workshop owner. …
  41. Two boys digging for a football post found Saint Monica's lost epitaphIn the summer of 1945, two boys dug a hole beside the church of Santa Aurea in Ostia to plant a football goalpost. They struck a fragment of the original gravestone of Monica, mot…
  42. The Bible never names Salome, and she wasn't consistently called that until the 1800sThe dancing girl who asks for John the Baptist's head is unnamed in the gospels; they call her only the daughter of Herodias. The name Salome comes from the historian Josephus, wh…
  43. Rowan Williams learned Russian just to read Dostoevsky in the originalRowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks or reads around a dozen languages, including Welsh, Syriac and Biblical Hebrew, and picked up Russian to read Dostoevsky…
  44. The first American pope holds a mathematics degree from VillanovaBefore he became Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago earned a mathematics degree, spent years as a missionary in Peru and took Peruvian citizenship. His 2025 election …
  45. A tomb marked LINVS may have belonged to someone called AquilinusPope Linus is usually counted as the second bishop of Rome, after Peter, yet the earliest lists name him as the first to receive the office from the apostles. A tomb found in Sain…
  46. Paul VI became the first reigning pope in over a century to leave ItalyIn January 1964, Pope Paul VI flew to Jordan, the first time a sitting pontiff had left Italy in more than a hundred years. The former Giovanni Battista Montini went on to steer t…
  47. Pius X crammed refugees into the Apostolic Palace after the 1908 earthquakeWhen the 1908 Messina earthquake left survivors homeless, Pope Pius X opened the Apostolic Palace to refugees, moving well ahead of Italy's own government. The son of a village po…
  48. Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust remains one of the Vatican's great debatesEugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 and reigned for 19 years spanning the Second World War, the Holocaust and the start of the Cold War. Defenders say his quiet dip…
  49. France's old provinces were never officially called provinces at allAsk for a map of the provinces of pre-revolutionary France and no two versions will match. Contemporaries never used the word for any official unit: the kingdom was carved separat…
  50. Raphael's name means God has healed, and his first mission involved a fishThe archangel Raphael first appears in the Book of Tobit and 1 Enoch, texts from roughly the 3rd to 2nd century BC. In Tobit he travels disguised as a man named Azariah, using a r…
  51. Raymond Burr's own life story was full of details nobody could verifyRaymond Burr won two Emmys as the unbeatable lawyer Perry Mason, but after his death in 1993 much of his biography proved impossible to confirm. His accounts of what he did around…
  52. Bishop Robert Barron's online videos have drawn over 84 million viewsNicknamed the bishop of the Internet, Robert Barron has produced more than 1,000 online video commentaries with over 84 million views, reviewing films, books and music through a C…
  53. Noomi Rapace invented her surname, choosing a word meaning bird of preyWhen Noomi Norén married actor Ola Norell in 2001, their surnames sounded so alike that neither wanted to take the other's. They made up a new one, Rapace, bird of prey in French …
  54. Augustine's doctrine of original sin leaned on a mistranslated verseThe belief that every human inherits Adam's guilt took centuries to form. Its most influential architect, Augustine of Hippo, built his case on a Latin rendering of Romans 5:12 th…
  55. Mexico's most sacred image was once denounced by friars as a local paintingThe cloak said to bear the Virgin Mary's image, left on Juan Diego's garment in 1531, draws more pilgrims than any other Catholic shrine on Earth. Yet in 1556 a Franciscan leader …
  56. Paul's letters sit in the Bible in order of length, not dateThirteen New Testament books carry Paul's name, but most scholars think he wrote only seven of them. Their running order in Bibles follows a simple rule: longest first, with the p…
  57. Pepin the Short became king by asking the Pope one pointed questionPepin already held real power over the Franks while a powerless Merovingian wore the crown. So he asked Pope Zachary whether it was proper for kings to lack royal power. The Pope …
  58. Polycarp of Smyrna, the bishop who linked Christians to the apostles' generationSecond-century Christians prized Polycarp because he had reportedly known John the Apostle and others who met Jesus. His pupil Irenaeus remembered him vividly decades later. He on…
  59. India marks Engineer's Day on the birthday of one dam builderEvery 15 September, India, Sri Lanka and Tanzania celebrate Engineer's Day in honour of M. Visvesvaraya. He patented automatic floodgates, shielded Hyderabad from its river, ran t…
  60. One Morisco town was expelled from Spain as an undefeated armed columnWhen Spain expelled its converted Muslims, the Moriscos, between 1609 and 1614, most left as refugees. The townsfolk of Hornachos, openly Muslim and famously defiant, were allowed…

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