Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) was an encyclopedist of the Roman Empire whose reputation as an expert on scientific matters endured until the Middle Ages.
Pliny was also known as Gaius Plinius Secundus.
His adopted son, Pliny the Younger (c. A.D. 61–c. A.D. 113), was a lawyer and administrator known mainly for the large collection of private letters he left behind.
Mongkut of Siam, the king in The King and I, had 9,000 wives and concubines. King Solomon, by contrast, had only 700.
The last viceroy of India was not Lord Mountbatten. Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979) was India’s last British viceroy, or governor general, from August 1947 to June 1948. Chakravarti Raj agopalachari (1879-1972) then served as governor-general of India’s interim government from June 1948 to January 1950, when the position was abolished.
In 1963, unemployed twenty-two-year-old Ernesto Miranda was arrested for stealing $8 from a bank employee in Phoenix, Arizona. While in custody, he was picked from a lineup by a young woman who said he had kidnapped and raped her. After two hours of interrogation, the police gained a confession from Miranda. The U.S. Supreme Court…
The one-time foreign minister and war minister of the Soviet Union Leon Trotsky was expelled from Russia by Joseph Stalin in 1929. He made his way to Mexico, where he was murdered, probably at Stalin’s command, in 1940.
Gimlet. Sir T. 0. Gimlette, a British naval surgeon who in 1890 developed the drink as a healthful cocktail. Grand Marnier. Named (in jest?) by hotel owner Cesar Ritz for a short businessman named Marnier Lapostolle, the inventor of the liqueur. Mickey Finn. A turn-of-the-century Chicago bartender who served the spiked drink to clients he…
Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), a Scotsman who moved to Chicago in 1842. He was deputy sheriff of Cook County before resigning in 1850 to open the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, specializing at first in railway theft cases. The agency’s motto was We Never Sleep, printed under an open eye.