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820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 3 of 14.

121. An honour capped at 24 living members, chosen by the monarch alonePrime ministers have tried for over a century to steer appointments to the Order of Merit, and the palace has kept shutting them out. Edward VII created it in 1902, and it still a…
122. Otis Redding got his big break because he was the driverIn 1962 Otis Redding drove guitarist Johnny Jenkins to a recording session in Memphis because Jenkins had no licence. The session fizzled, the studio let the driver sing two songs…
123. Otto Dix painted Weimar Germany so bluntly that museums hid his workA machine-gunner at the Somme, Otto Dix spent the rest of his life haunted by a dream of crawling through ruined houses. He turned that war into merciless art, and his bleak portr…
124. Nick Jonas was spotted in a barbershop at sixWhile his mother had her hair cut, a six-year-old Nick Jonas caught the attention of someone who referred him to a showbusiness manager. By seven he was on Broadway, and a Christm…
125. Nina Simone trained for Bach and became the High Priestess of SoulEunice Waymon spent her youth training to become a classical concert pianist. Rejected by the Curtis Institute, she took a job playing an Atlantic City bar whose owner insisted sh…
126. Norah Jones went from lounge singer to five Grammys in one nightA three-track demo passed along by a bandleader's wife landed Norah Jones at Blue Note, where executives worried about her direction but let her find it. Her debut, Come Away with…
127. Duchamp's moving nude was mocked as an explosion in a shingle factoryEven the Cubists found it too much. Marcel Duchamp's own brothers asked him to withdraw or retitle his 1912 painting, since a nude, the hanging committee felt, should not be shown…
128. Olivia Rodrigo's first single broke Spotify records within daysIn January 2021 a Disney actor released her debut single and watched it set Spotify's daily streaming record for a non-holiday song twice in two days. Olivia Rodrigo, who had nego…
129. The one-off Bond film that followed Fleming almost word for wordGeorge Lazenby, a model with no acting credits, beat hundreds of candidates to replace Sean Connery, then announced mid-shoot that he would play James Bond only once. His single o…
130. N.W.A called it reality rap and took hardcore hip-hop to number oneBanned from much of mainstream radio and shadowed by an FBI letter, a Compton group still sold over ten million units in the United States. N.W.A lasted only from 1987 to 1991, ye…
131. Neil Diamond lived on 35 cents a day before writing hitsSelling roughly one song a week, a young Brooklyn songwriter could spend just 35 cents a day on food. Then, working alone in a room above the Birdland club, Neil Diamond wrote Sol…
132. From Joy Division's ashes, New Order made the best-selling 12-inch everWhen Ian Curtis died in May 1980, the three remaining members of Joy Division kept a pact to drop the name. Rebuilding as New Order, they discovered New York club culture, taught …
133. Newfoundland dogs are built for rescues in icy waterWebbed paws, an oily water-shedding coat and males that can top 80 kilograms make the Newfoundland a natural lifeguard. Bred to work alongside fishermen, one untrained Newfoundlan…
134. Nat King Cole meant to be a jazz pianist until a bar customer demanded a songIn the late 1930s Nat Cole led a piano trio in Los Angeles clubs. The story goes that one night a patron insisted he sing, and Cole, not knowing the requested tune, offered Sweet …
135. Natalie Wood went from the girl in Miracle on 34th Street to Oscar nomineeNatalia Zacharenko, daughter of Russian refugees, was spotted by a film crew shooting in Santa Rosa and made her first screen appearance at four. By eight she was playing the doub…
136. The so-called Roman salute began with a French painting, not ancient RomeNo Roman sculpture shows a stiff raised arm, and no surviving Roman text describes one. Historians trace the gesture to Jacques-Louis David's 1784 canvas Oath of the Horatii, from…
137. Nehru called himself a mere prime minister before M. S. Subbulakshmi, a queen of musicAt eleven she sang in a temple hall in Tiruchirappalli; in 1966 she was the first Indian ever to take the stage before the UN General Assembly. M. S. Subbulakshmi went on to be th…
138. Michael Crawford did every Frank Spencer stunt himself and never used a doubleThe role of the accident-prone Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em was offered to Ronnie Barker and Norman Wisdom before Michael Crawford took it. A devotee of Buster Keaton…
139. Michael Douglas won his first Oscar as a producer, not an actorIn late 1971 Kirk Douglas handed his son the film rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, hoping to play its hero himself. Michael produced it, the director cast Jack Nicholson…
140. Mike Leigh builds his films from months of improvisation before any script existsMike Leigh starts a project with a set of unconnected characters, each invented by its actor. Only after long improvisation does he arrange meetings between them and sketch a bare…
141. Mike Nichols arrived in America at seven as a refugee and ended up with an EGOTIn April 1939, as the Nazis rounded up Berlin's Jews, a seven-year-old named Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky and his three-year-old brother were sent alone to New York to join their fath…
142. Disco Dancer made Mithun Chakraborty a star from Mumbai to the Soviet UnionMithun Chakraborty won a National Film Award for his very first role, in an art-house film by Mrinal Sen. Six years later he was doing the opposite: a flashy dance musical, Disco …
143. Motown started with an $800 family loan and a converted Detroit photo studioIn 1958 Berry Gordy needed $800 to release a single and persuaded his family to lend it from their shared savings account. He had wanted to call his label Tammy, after a Debbie Re…
144. A Cleveland DJ gave the Canadian trio Rush its American breakRush's first album sold modestly in Canada and critics called it a Led Zeppelin knockoff. Then Donna Halper, a DJ at Cleveland's WMMS, started spinning Working Man. Its blue-colla…
145. How a medieval nun's wish to trade hearts shaped a Catholic devotionA Cistercian mystic named Lutgarde, according to the story told of her, was offered any grace she wanted and asked to understand Latin better. The gift left her feeling empty, so …
146. Ringo Starr first drummed on hospital cabinets with a cotton-bobbin malletAt 13, Richard Starkey entered a tuberculosis sanatorium for two years. To ease boredom, staff formed a patients' band, and he banged a makeshift mallet made from a cotton bobbin …
147. Robbie Robertson won his first big break by writing two songs overnightAs a Toronto teenager, Robbie Robertson overheard rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins complain that he needed new material. He stayed up all night, wrote two songs, and played them for…
148. The cardinal who silenced Galileo also handed him his best defenceIn 1616 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine told Galileo to drop the idea of a moving Earth. Later he wrote Galileo a certificate saying he had only been informed of a decree, not forced t…
149. Robert Plant quit accountancy after two weeks to chase the bluesRobert Plant lasted only two weeks as a trainee chartered accountant. At 16 he left home to drift between Midlands blues bands, laying tarmac and stacking shelves to get by. Withi…
150. Why rock's hall of fame ended up beside Lake Erie in ClevelandWhen the rock hall went looking for a home, Memphis, Detroit and Philadelphia all had strong claims. Cleveland won by offering $65 million in public money and a history lesson: a …
151. Roger Daltrey built his first guitar and settled the Who's nameIn 1957 a London schoolboy carved himself a copy of a cherry red Stratocaster, then joined a skiffle group called the Detours. Seven years later, with another act already using th…
152. Rome's first written laws came from commoners demanding fair judgesEarly Roman magistrates applied unwritten custom however they liked. A plebeian tribune pushed to get the rules written down, and after eight years of struggle Rome produced the T…
153. Roy Orbison dyed his pale hair black long before the sunglassesThe black hair was never natural. As a shy kid in a dusty West Texas oil town, Roy Orbison was embarrassed by hair so pale it was nearly white, and he began dyeing it jet black wh…
154. The highest-grossing actor ever got his first big break in his thirtieth filmFilms featuring Samuel L. Jackson have taken more than 27 billion dollars worldwide, more than any other actor's. Yet he spent years as a stand-in, a night security guard and a st…
155. Every August, white petals fall inside a Roman basilica to recall summer snowLegend says snow fell on Rome's Esquiline Hill one August night in the fourth century, marking where the Virgin Mary wanted a church. The story surfaced only after the year 1000, …
156. Scarlett Johansson practised acting by staring into a mirror until she criedAs a small child in Manhattan, Scarlett Johansson rehearsed by gazing at her reflection until tears came, hoping to be Judy Garland. At seven she was crushed when an agent signed …
157. Paris spent a century and 1.4 billion euros making the Seine swimmable againSwimming in the Seine was banned in 1923 because the water was too dirty. By 1970 so much raw sewage poured in that only three fish species survived near Paris. Today more than 30…
158. Shirley MacLaine danced a whole ballet on a broken ankle before calling an ambulanceCast as the fairy godmother in Cinderella, young Shirley MacLaine snapped her ankle while warming up backstage. She laced her pointe shoes tighter, danced the entire performance, …
159. Shraddha Kapoor said no to Salman Khan at 16 because she wanted to be a psychologistBorn into one of Bollywood's busiest acting families, Shraddha Kapoor turned down a film offer from Salman Khan while still at school, planning to study psychology instead. She di…
160. Silesia holds the oldest known sentence ever written in PolishA region along the Oder River has belonged to Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany, and now lies mostly in Poland with slivers in the Czech Republic and Ge…
161. A music-school homework assignment launched the First Ladies of RapCheryl James and Sandra Denton met in a Sears lunchroom in Queens while training as nurses. A co-worker needed a song for his production class, so they recorded one. Radio listene…
162. Sam Cooke tried disguising his voice as Dale Cook and fooled nobodyGospel singers who crossed into pop risked scorn, so in 1956 Sam Cooke cut his first secular song under the fake name Dale Cook. His voice was too recognisable for the ruse to wor…
163. Sammy Davis Jr. began performing at two, billed as an adult to dodge the lawTo get around child labour laws, Sammy Davis Jr.'s father and godfather passed the tiny tap dancer off as a 44-year-old man of short stature. He had joined their vaudeville act at…
164. Before Wren's dome, Ludgate Hill carried a Gothic cathedral with a colossal spireChristopher Wren's dome, finished in 1710 and 365 feet high, stood as London's tallest building until 1963. It replaced Old St Paul's, a medieval giant whose spire reached roughly…
165. Stefan Zweig collected composers' manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his worksIn the 1920s and 1930s few writers anywhere were translated more widely than Stefan Zweig. He was also an obsessive collector of autograph manuscripts, and the hoard his heirs gav…
166. Stephen Colbert picked the French-sounding pronunciation of his surname on moving to collegeStephen Colbert's family said KOHL-bert. His father preferred the French-sounding version but kept the old one out of respect and let his children choose; Stephen switched to kohl…
167. Aerosmith took its name from a word Joey Kramer doodled on his school notebooksWhen the young band sharing a house at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston needed a name, drummer Joey Kramer offered a word he had scrawled across his school notebooks. His bandma…
168. Before Simon & Garfunkel, two Queens teenagers had a minor hit as Tom & JerryAt 15, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel paid $25 to record a song called Hey, Schoolgirl in a Manhattan studio. Billed as Tom & Jerry, they sold more than 100,000 copies and played Am…
169. Smokey Robinson walked into Motown carrying a notebook of 100 high school songsAfter a failed audition for Brunswick Records in August 1957, a Detroit teenager showed Berry Gordy a notebook holding 100 songs he had written in high school. Gordy was impressed…
170. The do-re-mi scale takes its names from the opening syllables of a medieval hymnIn eleventh-century Italy, Guido of Arezzo noticed that each line of a Latin hymn to St John the Baptist started one step higher than the last. He named six notes after those firs…
171. Sombr taught himself production on GarageBand before TikTok made him a star at 19Shane Boose started layering harmonies in GarageBand at the end of elementary school. In March 2025, two of his songs, Back to Friends and Undressed, took off on TikTok and climbe…
172. Sonata form got its name decades after Haydn and Mozart had perfected itHaydn and Mozart wrote the model examples of sonata form in the late 18th century, yet no theorist of their day used that name. The textbook template came later, built by 19th-cen…
173. Stevie Wonder nearly quit music for Ghana, then made Songs in the Key of LifeIn March 1975 Stevie Wonder was seriously planning to leave the music business and move to Ghana to help disabled children. Instead he signed the biggest recording contract yet, v…
174. The Band's name came from what Woodstock locals called themFor years they backed someone else: rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, then Bob Dylan when he went electric. Around Woodstock everyone just called them the band, so when four Canad…
175. A freezing, broken-down tour bus led Buddy Holly to charter his final flightIn the winter of 1959 Buddy Holly's package tour zigzagged across the Midwest in buses whose heaters kept failing, during the coldest winter in 30 years. His drummer ended up in h…
176. Beethoven's Seventh premiered as a wartime charity gig and won an instant encoreIn December 1813 Beethoven conducted his new Seventh Symphony in Vienna to raise money for soldiers wounded at Hanau. The audience loved the slow-ish second movement so much they …
177. Fainting at the sight of blood may be an ancient trick for playing deadRoughly 15 percent of people react to blood, needles or injury by feeling faint. One evolutionary idea holds that collapsing once helped our ancestors survive attackers and slowed…
178. Talking Heads took their name from a TV Guide phrase: all content, no actionThree Rhode Island art students moved into a New York loft, opened for the Ramones at CBGB in June 1975, and borrowed their band name from TV slang for a head-and-shoulders shot. …
179. Country queen Tammy Wynette kept renewing her beautician's licence just in caseTammy Wynette sold an estimated 30 million records and put twenty singles at the top of the US country chart. Yet every year until she died she renewed her cosmetology licence, in…
180. Technicolor's first colour films needed a technician babysitting every projectorThe earliest Technicolor system of 1916 split each shot into red and green frames and demanded a special projector with two lenses and a prism that kept drifting out of line. Only…

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