Wilkie Collins

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Wilkie Collins drank laudanum by the tumbler — eventually enough to kill several men — and dictated two complete novels in states he later had no memory of. His housekeeper measured the doses. The manuscripts survived him.

Trajan's two Dacian campaigns dragged 165 tonnes of gold and 330 tonnes of silver back to Rome — enough to fund gladiatorial games lasting 123 days straight. The kingdom of Dacia ceased to exist.

Olympic champion Fabio Casartelli, 24, hit a concrete bollard at 88 km/h on the Col de Portet d'Aspet in 1995 — without a helmet. His teammates rode the next stage in silence, no one sprinting.

The Persian satrap Tissaphernes invited the Greek generals of the Ten Thousand to a peace feast in 401 BC, then seized and beheaded each one — leaving 10,000 soldiers leaderless in the Persian heartland.

Mithridates VI ingested measured poisons daily for decades to build immunity, then waged 46 years of war against Rome. When he finally tried to poison himself at defeat, the doses failed. He had to beg a soldier to run him through.

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.

Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay 'Thinking Sex' placed consensual intergenerational sex on a 'charmed circle' diagram beside murder as objects of equal public hysteria. The map still burns.

At Entebbe, hijackers sorted 248 passengers by passport — Jews to one side, non-Jews released. The remaining hostages were held in a terminal as ransom for 53 prisoners held across four countries. Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to answer.

The common swift lives its entire adult life in the air — sleeping, mating, and moulting on the wing — touching ground only to nest. It may fly two million kilometres in a lifetime without once choosing to land.