Irritator

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.

Chinese propaganda poster from the Korean War era: "Vaccinate everyone, to crush the germ warfare of US imperialism !"

Paleontologists named it 'Irritator' — formally, in the scientific literature — because a fossil smuggler had packed car body filler into the skull to counterfeit a complete specimen.

Kommandokorps

Boys as young as ten are circumcised, sleep in the veld, and recite Afrikaner identity oaths at Kommandokorps camps — a private paramilitary operating openly in the post-apartheid state.

Dunhuang

Dunhuang was a garrison of 10,000 soldiers at the edge of the Gobi — yet its buried caves held more languages, religions, and literary genres than any site west of Alexandria. An outpost that swallowed civilizations.

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.

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.

Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War

China charged the U.S. with dropping plague-infected fleas and cholera-laced clams over North Korea in 1952. Twenty-five captured American airmen confessed. Every confession was later recanted. The insects remain unresolved.

Tissaphernes

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.

Raid at Cabanatuan

Rangers and Alamo Scouts sprinted 30 miles behind Japanese lines to Cabanatuan, where 511 POWs — some carried on stretchers — were freed hours before a planned mass execution. Every prisoner made it out.

Battle of Chancellorsville

Lee's most brilliant tactical victory was also the shot that doomed the Confederacy: returning from a night reconnaissance, Stonewall Jackson was fired upon by his own men and died eight days later.