The unattainable was most desireable. The already attained was dull.
But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with...
Yet she (Princess Diana) suffered one ancient lament of many princess brides--- her husband didn't love her, hadn't wanted to marry her, rarely slept with her, and far prefered his mistress.
When Marguerite (Marguerite-Louise of France, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), caught malaria, she claimed the royal family of Tuscany was trying to murder her, but that she would, in fact, rather die than...
Alex looks around at Heph, at Diodotus, at handsome Telekles and round-faced Phrixos,
In 1891, Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Fredrick Augustus, the heir to to the Saxon throne. The Prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later,...
Hagnon fixes a value to everything. It occurs to Alexander that the man would probably sell his mother for an obol and consider it a deal.
Divine grace, Caravaggio shows us, is not reserved for the rich and powerful, but falls equally on the poor and humble.
Her legacy is that of a woman who refused to conform to the misogynistic traditions of her time.
O do not be born a woman, if you want your own way. —Lucrezia de’ Medici O
Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.
The more I see of men, she grumbled in one, the more I love dogs.50
Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass. —Michel de Montaigne O
History offers us not a single recorded cell phone conversation between Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan in which His Most Christian Majesty wishes he were a tampon, or photos of Nell Gwynn sunbathin...
In the 1590s, physicians examining the corpse of King Henri IV’s twenty-six-year-old mistress agreed that she had, in fact, been killed by a corrupt lemon.320
Maimonides likewise recommended immediate vomiting after consuming suspect food and praised rooster dung as one of the most effective means to bring this about. It is said that excrements of roosters...
Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.
When the destiny of a nation is in a woman’s bedroom, the best place for the historian is in the antechamber. — CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE
Boring, religious, and intellectually limited, Marie Leczinska was called one of the two dullest queens in Europe by her own father, the other dull queen being his wife. Marie
To cure epilepsy, doctors concocted recipes of dried human heart or made a potion of wine, lily, lavender, and an entire adult brain, which weighed about three pounds. Human fat was used to treat cons...
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