Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600. National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Miscellany
The first ruler of a unified Chinese empire and father of the Great Wall, Emperor Shihuangdi commissioned a twenty-square-mile mausoleum, which took around 700,000 laborers more than thirty-five years to complete. Inside, there were about eight thousand terracotta soldiers, seventy burial sites, a zoo, and weapons triggered to go off in case of robbers. The chief craftsmen, it is believed, were also buried there to prevent them from betraying construction secrets.
The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970Lapham’sDaily
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