Sutton Hoo helmet

Illustration of a Hungarian Hajduk, from an 1703 book from Bavaria.

The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The epitome of the Rohan Master's art is the " Lamentation of the Virgin " (f. 135, Pl. 57) from the Hours of the Cross. The grieving Virgin cannot be consoled by the Apostle John , who looks up in consternation at a saddened God.

Sutton Hoo helmet

Buried in a Suffolk mound around 625 CE with a 27-metre ship and a king's full treasure, the Sutton Hoo helmet was found in 1939 in over 500 fragments — reconstructed, it still carries the pressed impression of a human face in its iron cheekplates.

Order of the Solar Temple

In October 1994, 53 Solar Temple members died across Switzerland, Quebec, and France in synchronized rituals — stabbed, suffocated, shot, then burned. More followed in 1995 and 1997. Leaders claimed transit to Sirius.

Voltaire

Voltaire scrawled 'absurd' across his personal Bible hundreds of times, then predicted Christianity would be extinct within a century. His Geneva house became a Bible Society depot 50 years after his death.

Therizinosaurus

Therizinosaurus carried three-foot claws — longer than any animal's, ever recorded — and used them to rake leaves. The most terrifying hand on the planet belonged to a herbivore.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was hauled off an Air France plane at JFK in his underwear, May 2011, accused by hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo of assault — ending the near-certain next presidency of France.

Battle of Hattin

Saladin personally beheaded Raynald of Châtillon after the battle, then offered water to the captured King of Jerusalem — and withdrew it. The True Cross was captured and never returned. Crusader Palestine died here.

Hajduk

Hajduks were hunted outlaws turned folk saints — men who fled Ottoman tax collectors into the mountains and were later immortalized in epic verse. The same raid that burned a village made a ballad by spring.

National Ignition Facility

192 lasers converge on a target smaller than a pencil eraser, briefly creating temperatures hotter than the sun's core. In 2022, NIF finally got more energy out than it put in.

Rohan Hours

In the Rohan Hours, painted around 1420, a skeletal dying man lies naked on bare ground while God leans down from the sky to address him directly — a private conversation between a mortal and the divine, held across a page smaller than a hardback book.