Liberum veto (Latin for "I freely forbid") was a parliamentary device in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It allowed any member of the Sejm to force an immediate end to the current session and nullify all legislation already passed at it by shouting Nie pozwalam!
Victor Gollancz studied the classics at Oxford University and during World War I began his life in publishing. In 1927, he set up his own publishing house and his career took off. Gollancz was ahead of this time and placed full-page adverts for his books in newspapers (very rare for this period) and his designers established a recognizable style featuring powerful typography and yellow dust jackets. Gollancz was creating branding 50 years before marketers embraced the buzzword.
The Skippers Road is one of New Zealand's most scenic roads. This gravel road, with a length of 16,5 miles, carved by hand by miners over 140 years ago is made from a very narrow cut in the middle of a sheer cliff face. It’s a road so dangerous that your rental car insurance won’t be honored if you drive on it.
The Tunguska Event was a powerful explosion that occurred over the so-called Southern swamp, a small morass not far from the Tunguska River in Russia. Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5-10 kilometres above the Earth's surface.
Moscow gold refers to the operation by which 510 tonnes of gold, corresponding to 72.6% of the total gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, were transferred from their original location in Madrid to the Soviet Union a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
The golden silk orb-weavers are a genus of araneomorph spiders noted for the impressive webs they weave. The females usually eat their mate.
Daphne Guinness is prominent in the fashion world as a style icon, journalist and noted collector of haute couture. The close relationship between her and married French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has become something of an open secret known and acknowledged by most American society columnists.
William Buckland is famous for two things: he was the first man to write a full account of a fossil, and he was incredibly eccentric when it came to animals and food. Buckland’s love of natural history resulted in his house being something akin to a zoo. He filled it with animals of every kind and he then proceeded to eat them all (and serve them to guests). He claimed to have eaten his way through every animal. The creatures that he said tasted worst were bluebottle flies, and mole. Various guests to dinner describe being served panther, crocodile, and mouse.
Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. His 30 years in power, to Dominicans known as the Trujillo Era, is considered one of the bloodiest ever in the Americas, as well as a time of a classic personality cult, when monuments to Trujillo were in abundance. It has been estimated that Trujillo's rule was responsible for the death of more than 50,000 people. At the suggestion of Mario Fermín Cabral, Congress voted overwhelmingly in 1936 to rename the capital from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo. The province of San Cristobal was created as "Trujillo," and the nation's highest peak, Pico Duarte, was renamed in his honor. Statues of "El Jefe" were mass-produced and erected across the Republic, and bridges and public buildings were named in his honor. The nation's newspapers now had praise for Trujillo as part of the front page, and license plates included the slogan "Viva Trujillo!" An electric sign was erected in Ciudad Trujillo so that "Dios y Trujillo" could be seen at night as well as in the day. Eventually, even churches were required to post the slogan, "Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra" (God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth). Trujillo was recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize by his admirers, but the committee declined the suggestion. When he received (or summoned) a visitor, his four bodyguards would have submachine guns trained upon the "guest" during the meeting.
Adolfo Farsari was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. He was one of the many foreign and Japanese commercial photographers who operated in Yokohama from the 1860s to the 1880s.