"An Intimate History of Humanity"
The painting on the cover of this book is called 'El Pelele' by Goya, but it's a different version from the one at the Hammer Collection at UCLA.
- Metchinikoff tried suicide, on this occasion for the second time by injecting himself with relapsing fever germs.
- Cotton Mather (often remembered for his persecution of witches)
- Reaumur lived at a time when insects (though spiders are wrongly thought to be insects) were judged unworthy of being mentioned in an encyclopedia, even by the liberal Diderot.
- Humboldt's research was directed therefore to 'awakening an understanding of all that is lovable'. <> 'I shall never forget,' said Darwin, 'that my whole course of life is due to having read and reread as a youth his Personal Narrative.'
- .... dandies (banished) for the crime of wearing trousers, which was the garb of his German enemies. Roman soldiers wore miniskirts: that was the limit of toleration.
- Asoka was not, as so many monarchs have been, just another bundle of human weaknesses trying to do his duty.
- One of the Quakers, Mary Fisher, travelled 1,500 miles on foot to urge the Sultan of Turkey to change his ways, and he received her:
- (In the New World,) among the missionaries' methods for converting was 'emasculation', grabbing men by their testicles until they collapsed in pain.
- Before that date there used to be people who would take an illegitimate child off your hands for ten dollars. By 1920 prospective parents were paying a thousand dollars to obtain a child to adopt, and Mrs Georgia Tann of Memphis was the first woman in the world to become a millionaire by running an adoption agency.
- The Sultan of Turkey chose Donizetti to be musical director of his court.
- The United States was remarkable for the suddenness and versatility with which it moved from drug to drug, from one escape to another: alcohol, opium, cigarettes, cocaine, (Cocaine was the official remedy of the Hay Fever Association.)
- Frank Baum... founded The Shop Window, the first magazine devoted to window dressing: seeing an object in a shop window, he said, should 'arouse in the observer a cupidity and longing to possess the goods'.