After receiving a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell, “I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals—the ultimate revolution?” By this he meant “the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology.” Thirty-two years earlier, Huxley had taught French to Orwell at Eton College.
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“Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one,” wired George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, referring to Pygmalion’s premiere. “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one,” Churchill wired back.
In January 1592, playwright Christopher Marlowe was arrested for counterfeiting in the Netherlands. For making coins of pewter, Marlowe was charged with the crime of petty treason, punishable by death. He was eventually sent back to London, where, a little more than a year later, he was stabbed to death in Deptford.
In 2008 a Bronx-based Red Sox fan worked one day of construction at the new Yankee Stadium—having said up to then he wouldn’t go there “for all the hot dogs in the world”—so he could bury a Red Sox jersey in the cement, hoping to “jinx that stadium.” His defiant act was reported to Yankee officials, who spent $50,000 digging up the jersey and threatened legal action. “It was worth it,” the fan said.
Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835—two weeks after the perihelion of Halley’s Comet. “I came in with Halley’s Comet,” Mark Twain commented in 1909. “It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” He died on April 21, 1910—one day after the comet had once again reached its perihelion.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned nearly four thousand ancient Iraqi artifacts in 2018 that Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City–based chain of craft stores owned by an evangelical Christian family, had purchased from dealers in the United Arab Emirates. A year later investigators alleged that the Museum of the Bible, founded by the same family, had in its holdings thirteen artifacts belonging to the Egypt Exploration Society. The museum said it would return the artifacts.
A twelfth-century-bc Chinese king consulted an oracle and was told his lucky charm would not be a tiger, dragon, bear, or leopard but rather a wise counselor. He soon came upon a sagacious old man fishing in the river and conscripted him into service. It is said the man’s virtue was such that he fished not with a hook but with a straight piece of iron; acknowledging his integrity, fish impaled themselves voluntarily.
Observing Mars through his telescope in 1877, Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli saw oceans and canali, meaning channels. The latter was mistranslated into English as canals, implying Martian-made waterways, and an amateur astronomer named Percival Lowell soon began publishing books pointing to these as evidence of life on Mars. By 1910 photographic technology had advanced sufficiently to debunk his extrapolated theories.
Walter Kirke, British deputy head of military intelligence in France, noted in his diary in October 1915 that the chief (“C”) of the Secret Intelligence Service had come upon a solution for how to send secret messages: “Heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen,” Kirke wrote. The substance, it turned out, was hard to detect by the common revealing method of iodine vapor. The chief’s name: Mansfield Cumming.
To label a program conceived in 2007 that declared as its purpose the tracking of “every user visible” on the Internet, collected data from over a trillion Web events in a repository called the Black Hole, and targeted sites broadcasting recitations of the Qur’an, the UK Government Communications Headquarters chose the name Karma Police, after a song by the band Radiohead whose chorus is: “This is what you’ll get / when you mess with us.”
The medieval Occitan troubadour known as the Monk of Montaudon was a master of the enueg, “song of annoyance.” “I can’t stand a long wait,” he complains in one composition, written around 1200, “Or a priest who lies and perjures himself / Or an old whore who is past it, / And—by Saint Delmas—I don’t like / A base man who enjoys too much comfort.” The song goes on in this fashion for nine more verses.
“Those on the right and those on the left you have placed in your lap,” proclaimed an Assyrian prophetess in 680 bc in support of King Esarhaddon, who had defeated his brothers in civil war. Another prophetess promised to “tear apart” those “conniving polecats and rats.”
Plato’s uncle Charmides boasted to wealthy aristocrat Callias that poverty granted freedom. “I lose nothing because I have nothing,” he said. Callias was unconvinced. “So, do you also pray never to be rich,” he asked, “and if you have a good dream, do you sacrifice to the averters of disaster?” “Not at all,” Charmides replied, “I accept the outcome like a daredevil.”
President Abraham Lincoln on November 21, 1864, sent a letter to Mrs. Bixby, who, the War Department informed him, had lost five sons fighting for the Union. “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” In fact, two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons were killed in action, a third either deserted or died while a prisoner of war, a fourth was honorably discharged, and the fifth deserted.
In 1956 a shelter run by Catholic social worker Dorothy Day was ordered closed by New York City for being a firetrap. Day was fined $250. On her way to court, she passed a group of needy-looking men, one of whom gave her a check and said, “I want to help out a little bit toward the fine. Here’s two-fifty.” Based on the man’s shabby dress, Day assumed he had given $2.50; later she noticed the check was for the full amount and signed by W.H. Auden, who had read about her case and come to help. “Poets do look a bit unpressed, don’t they?” Day said.