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On the morning of May 5, 1997, a bank holiday Monday, eight-year-old Jamie Lavis climbed onto a bus on Ashton Old Road in Greater Manchester. It was around 10.30am, and it was the last time anyone would see him alive. What followed was five months of searches, television appeals and a community desperate for answers, all of it quietly stage-managed by the one man who already knew exactly what had happened to him: the bus driver, Darren Vickers. A Boy Who Never Made It Home Jamie Lavis was, by every account, a lively and trusting kid, the sort of boy who'd happily chat to the driver on his route to see family. He had no reason to be wary of Vickers, a bus driver working the route towards Stalybridge who let him mess about with the gears and hand out tickets to other passengers, small kindnesses that looked, to everyone watching, like nothing more than a driver being nice to a bored kid on a bank holiday. Other passengers later remembered Vickers ruffling Jamie's hair and the boy pressing his face against the glass of the driver's cabin, delighted with his little taste of responsibility. None of it registered as strange at the time. It was only afterwards, once Jamie never came home, that those small moments took on a different shape entirely. His disappearance triggered one of the most intensive missing-person searches Greater Manchester had seen. Police, volunteers and the Lavis family combed parks, waterways and wasteland for any sign of him, and for five agonising months there was nothing. What nobody outside Vickers himself knew was that Jamie's body was lying in woodland at Reddish Vale golf course, near Stockport, the entire time. The Driver Who Wouldn't Leave Within days of Jamie vanishing, Vickers had made himself indispensable to the investigation. He told police, and later the cameras, that he was haunted by the knowledge that he'd been the last person to see Jamie alive. He joined the search parties, he gave interviews, and he sat beside Jamie's parents, John Lavis and Karen Spooner, on the news, urging the public to come forward with anything they knew. To anyone watching, he looked like a decent man wracked with guilt over a tragedy he'd stumbled into. What he was actually doing was far stranger and far colder. Vickers moved into the Lavis family home and slept in their bed, while John and Karen, exhausted and grieving, offered to take the sofa so their guest would be comfortable. For months, the man who had killed their son ate at their table, joined searches he knew were combing empty ground, and comforted them in front of television cameras, all while sitting on the one piece of information that would have ended their nightmare instantly. He even used a police scanner to monitor radio traffic, arriving at potential sighting locations before officers did, a habit that struck colleagues and detectives alike as bordering on obsessive. In a bizarre twist that only emerged at trial, Vickers later claimed he'd had an affair with Karen Spooner in the months after Jamie disappeared, an allegation she denied outright, insisting no such relationship had ever taken place. Darren Vickers with Jamie's parents Karen and John Lavis The Cracks Start to Show It was that same relentless, overfamiliar presence that first put Vickers on police radars. Detectives running background checks on him found that nearly every work reference he'd supplied was fabricated, and the single one that wasn't fake belonged to a convicted paedophile. Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Rainford, who led the investigation, later said the evidence pointed increasingly and unmistakably towards Vickers as the case went on, even as Vickers tried to shift suspicion elsewhere, at one point attempting to implicate Jamie's own father. While held on remand, Vickers gave himself away further, confiding in a cellmate a heavily "sanitised" version of events: that Jamie had accidentally hit his head aboard the bus, and that he'd panicked and disposed of the body. Prosecutor Brian Leveson QC would later dismiss this account in court as a calculated attempt to minimise what he'd actually done. By October 1997, five months after Jamie vanished, the case against Vickers was strong enough for his arrest, and it was around this time that Jamie's remains were finally located at Reddish Vale, wrapped in tarpaulin and cloth, still dressed in the blue Reebok tracksuit he'd disappeared in. Only his torso and jawbone were recovered; his head and limbs were never found, and the state of decomposition meant a precise cause of death could never be established. What investigators could determine was that his clothes had been removed, and combined with Vickers' ties to a known paedophile, it pointed towards a sexual assault that the trial would later confirm had taken place. A Trial That Laid the Deception Bare Vickers' trial at Manchester Crown Court in 1999 exposed the full scale of what he'd done, not just the killing itself, but the calculated performance he'd given in its aftermath: the search parties, the tearful appeals, the months spent sleeping in a dead child's parents' bed while they slept on their own sofa. The jury found him guilty of Jamie's abduction and murder. Sentencing him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 25 years, Mr Justice Forbes did not mince words: "These are truly wicked crimes. Jamie's brief life was cruelly and prematurely brought to an end because he had the tragic misfortune of boarding your bus at around 10.30am on Ashton Old Road on May 5 1997. Thereafter you carefully groomed this little boy so he stayed on your bus for the rest of the day. You did this for your own base motives and intended to, and did, sexually abuse this little boy and then killed him and abandoned his body in Reddish Vale. You unclothed his body and left it naked on the ground." Outside court, Jamie's grandmother Barbara Lavis offered a far simpler epitaph for the boy the family had lost: "He was streetwise but he was a lovely little boy." A Case That Refuses to Close Under his 25-year minimum term, Vickers wasn't due for Parole Board review until 2024. He was referred a year early, in 2023, as standard practice, and reviewed again in February 2024, and on both occasions the board decided he was not suitable for release or even a transfer to open prison conditions. The board's published summary gives an unusually detailed picture of its reasoning: it noted that Vickers' offending had been rooted in factors including "him finding children sexually attractive, his early life experiences, his decision making, his choice of friends and his difficulties in managing extreme emotions." It also acknowledged that from around 2014 he'd begun admitting his offending to prison professionals and completing accredited programmes addressing his behaviour, and that he hadn't even sought release at this hearing. None of that was enough to convince the panel the risk he posed could be safely managed outside prison. Each hearing is watched closely by Jamie's family, by the local press, and by Manchester Evening News crime reporter John Scheerhout, who covered the original case in the 1990s and has been vocal that Vickers "should never be released from prison." The case has resurfaced repeatedly since, in the 2018 documentary Faking It: Tears of a Crime, in episode 259 of the Casefile True Crime podcast, and more recently in the second season of Netflix's When Missing Turns to Murder. It belongs to a small, grim category of British cases where the killer wormed his way directly into the search for his own victim, a pattern that resurfaces in cases like the online grooming and murder of Breck Bednar, where a trusted adult exploited his access to a child right up until it was too late. Sources 1. The Guardian — "Bus driver gets life for boy's murder" — https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/apr/24/davidward.libbybrooks 2. The Guardian — "Bus driver 'lured boy to his death'" — https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/mar/03/davidward 3. The Independent — "Life for bus driver who killed boy, 8" — https://www.independent.co.uk/news/life-for-bus-driver-who-killed-boy-8-1089190.html 4. The Irish Times — "Bus driver gets life for murder" — https://www.irishtimes.com/news/bus-driver-gets-life-for-murder-1.177346 5. HoldTheFrontPage — "Crime reporter demands Darren Vickers remains behind bars" — https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2022/news/crime-reporter-demands-killer-paedophile-remains-behind-bars/ 6. Yorkshire Live (Examiner Live) — "Jamie Lavis: the paedophile bus driver who murdered him and where he is now" — https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/jamie-lavis-paedophile-bus-driver-27218010 7. Casefile True Crime — Episode 259: "Jamie Lavis" — https://casefilepodcast.com/case-259-jamie-lavis/ 8. Faking It: Tears of a Crime (TV documentary, 2018) — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9272358/

In the history of overland travel, few journeys have captured the imagination quite like the legendary London to Calcutta bus service. Operated by Albert Travel, this route offered an extraordinary adventure spanning continents, cultures, and countless miles. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the bus service connected two iconic cities through an unforgettable expedition, becoming a symbol of exploration, resilience, and the spirit of adventure. The Genesis of the Route The inception of the London to Calcutta bus service can be traced back to the post-war era, a time marked by a burgeoning fascination with travel and discovery. Albert Travel, under the guidance of its visionary founder Albert Padgham, sought to create a travel experience that was as enriching as it was audacious. The maiden journey set out from London on April 15, 1957, and arrived in Calcutta on June 5, taking 50 days to cover over 10,000 miles (16,000 km) one way . The Route and Its Challenges The journey from London to Calcutta covered approximately 10,000 miles, passing through countries such as England, Belgium, West Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia (now Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia), Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. After entering India, the bus reached Calcutta via New Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, and Banaras. Each segment of the route presented unique challenges, from navigating the rugged terrains of the Middle East to dealing with the bureaucratic intricacies of cross-border travel. Despite the hurdles, the bus service maintained a remarkable degree of reliability and safety. The itinerary included stops in historic cities such as Istanbul, Tehran, Kabul, and Lahore, allowing passengers to immerse themselves in diverse cultures and landscapes. Traveling on the London to Calcutta bus was no ordinary experience. The bus itself was equipped with amenities designed to provide a modicum of comfort on the long journey. Passengers could expect sleeping berths, a small kitchen for basic meals, and storage for their belongings. The cost of the trip one-way was £85 in 1957 (equivalent to £2,589 in 2023) and £145 in 1973 (equivalent to £2,215 in 2023). This amount included food, travel, and accommodation . One passenger, Peter Moss, recounted in his memoirs the incredible sense of camaraderie that developed among the diverse group of travelers. "We were from all corners of the globe," he wrote, "yet the bus became our shared home, and the journey bonded us in ways we never imagined." Another traveller, Jane Owen, remembered celebrating her 30th birthday somewhere in the Iranian desert, with her fellow passengers improvising a cake out of biscuits and jam. Each trip was a microcosm of global diversity, bringing together individuals from various backgrounds united by a common desire for adventure. Stories of the road were shared, friendships were forged, and the spirit of discovery prevailed. The bus service was as much about the journey as it was about the destination, offering an unparalleled opportunity to witness the world's rich tapestry up close. Eyewitness accounts from passengers provide a vivid picture of life on the road. Bill Meredith, who traveled on the bus in the late 1960s, shared his experience in an interview: "Crossing into India was like stepping into another world. The sights, sounds, and smells were overwhelming, but in the best possible way. We spent hours wandering through bazaars, tasting local food, and absorbing the vibrant culture." Barbara Holmes, another adventurer, reminisced about the thrill of navigating the Khyber Pass. "The narrow, winding roads and sheer drops were terrifying, but the views were breathtaking. It was a white-knuckle ride, but one I'll never forget," she said. These firsthand stories highlight the mix of excitement and challenge that characterised the journey. The Decline and Legacy The London to Calcutta bus service thrived during an era when overland travel was imbued with a sense of romance and daring. However, geopolitical changes, the advent of affordable air travel, and increasing political instability in some regions along the route eventually led to the service's decline. After some years the bus met with an accident and became unusable. It was purchased by Andy Stewart, a British traveller, who rebuilt it into a mobile home with two levels and renamed it Albert. This double-decker bus travelled from Sydney to London via India on October 8, 1968, taking about 132 days to reach London . Albert Tours was a company based in England and Australia and operated on the London–Calcutta–London and London–Calcutta–Sydney routes. The bus reached India through Iran and then traveled to Singapore through Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. From Singapore, the bus was transported to Perth in Australia by ship, and from there it travelled by road to Sydney. The service charged £145 for the trip from London to Calcutta and included all modern facilities as before. However, it was discontinued in 1976 due to political conditions leading up to the Iranian Revolution and the escalation of tensions between Pakistan and India . Albert Tours completed about 15 trips between Kolkata to London and again from London to Sydney before the service ended permanently . Despite its cessation, the legacy of the London to Calcutta bus service endures. It remains a testament to a bygone era of travel, a time when the journey was as significant as the destination. The tales of those who embarked on this epic voyage continue to inspire modern-day adventurers and serve as a reminder of the extraordinary possibilities that await those willing to venture off the beaten path. Sources "The London to Calcutta Bus." BBC News, 2 Oct. 2021. Meredith, Bill. "Journeys: London to Calcutta." Travelogue, July 1969. Owen, Jane. "Bus Birthday: A Journey to Remember." Personal Memoir, 1972. Holmes, Barbara. "Through the Khyber Pass." Adventure Magazine, June 1975. "London-Calcutta Bus Service History." Vintage Travel, 2022. "Cost and Comforts of the London-Calcutta Bus Service." Travel Archives, 2023. "Maiden Journey of the London to Calcutta Bus." Historical Journeys, 1957. "Accident and Reconstruction of the London to Calcutta Bus." Road Adventures, 1968. "Albert Tours: From London to Sydney." Transcontinental Travels, 1976. "Route Details of the London to Calcutta Bus." Global Trekker, 1975. "Modern Facilities on the London to Calcutta Bus." Travel Innovations, 1973. "End of an Era: The London to Calcutta Bus Service." World Travel History, 1976. "The Legacy of the London to Calcutta Bus." Overland Legends, 2023.

The Syd Barrett whom Roger Waters encountered during their time at Cambridgeshire High School For Boys was markedly distinct from the one he last saw, a meeting that still troubles Waters to this day. They were young when they became friends and together, they created magic with Pink Floyd. Sadly, Barrett fell into the grip of drugs, leading to a gradual transformation into a mere shadow of his former self. Eventually, the band had to let him go as he was no longer capable of performing. Following his departure, the band initially made every effort to support him and prevent further deterioration of his health. Despite their best intentions during the release of his two solo albums in 1970, Barrett was beyond assistance and deemed a lost cause, resulting in the breakdown of their relationship. As a group, they would hold another meeting with Barrett. At some point during the recording session, Barrett, who had gained weight and shaved his head and eyebrows, unexpectedly entered the studio. Mason later mentioned that he couldn't be sure if "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was the song being recorded at that moment. Due to his significantly altered appearance, the band took a while to recognise him. When they eventually realised that the quiet man in the corner was Barrett, Roger Waters was deeply upset by Barrett's changed look, leading him to tears. Despite being asked to replay the suite for Barrett, he declined, stating that it was unnecessary since they had just heard it. When asked for his opinion on the song, Barrett described it as sounding "a bit old." He then quietly left during the festivities for Gilmour's wedding to Ginger Hasenbein, which occurred later that day. Gilmour confirmed this account, although he couldn't recall which piece they were working on when Barrett appeared. The episode is taken up by Wright as follows: Roger was there, and he was sitting at the desk, and I came in and I saw this guy sitting behind him – huge, bald, fat guy. I thought, "He looks a bit... strange..." Anyway, so I sat down with Roger at the desk and we worked for about ten minutes, and this guy kept on getting up and brushing his teeth and then sitting – doing really weird things, but keeping quiet. And I said to Roger, "Who is he?" and Roger said "I don't know." And I said "Well, I assumed he was a friend of yours," and he said "No, I don't know who he is." Anyway, it took me a long time, and then suddenly I realised it was Syd, after maybe 45 minutes. He came in as we were doing the vocals for "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", which was basically about Syd. He just, for some incredible reason picked the very day that we were doing a song which was about him. And we hadn't seen him, I don't think, for two years before. That's what's so incredibly... weird about this guy. And a bit disturbing, as well, I mean, particularly when you see a guy, that you don't, you couldn't recognize him. And then, for him to pick the very day we want to start putting vocals on, which is a song about him. Very strange During a discussion with The Mirror in 2008, Waters recounted the event. He initially mentioned experimenting with acid before shifting the conversation to Barrett's health, suggesting it was not solely attributed to drugs. He said: “It’s quite amazing to have your aural and visual perceptions overturned like that – but so what? The only art that lasts is art that comes from people who experience their connections with their fellow man and woman in ways that are more deeply felt. To think drugs have a part in that is bollocks, frankly.” “Who knows what he might have done without it, but I don’t think Syd was driven crazy by too much acid,” Waters continued. “The symptoms of the mental illness he had were exacerbated by acid, but I don’t think it made him ill.” Waters concluded: “When he died, he had been gone for so many years. When I heard he was ill, I tried and failed to contact his sister to ask if I could help. But there was nothing that could be done. It wasn’t like he needed any money. Everything that could be done for him was done. The last time I saw him was a couple of years. After he turned up at the Wish You Were Here sessions. I bumped into him in Harrods where he used to go to buy sweets. But we didn’t speak – he sort of scuttled away.” Barrett's downfall is symbolised by Waters' last meeting with him, which is truly heartbreaking because they didn't exchange a single word. They used to be very close, but inexplicably, they ended up not even speaking to each other.

On June 20th, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children in the bathtub of her Houston home, then called 911 and asked for an officer without explaining why. She was convicted of capital murder less than a year later. Then it turned out the prosecution's star witness had built a chunk of his testimony around a TV episode that never aired, because it didn't exist. Yates got a second trial, and a second jury reached a completely different verdict. That swing, guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity, is really the whole story here. Not because Yates was innocent of killing her children; she always admitted she did it. The question that actually decided her fate was whether she understood it was wrong, and the case for that turned out to rest partly on a lie nobody caught until after the first jury had already convicted her. A Decline That Was Documented and Ignored Yates had struggled with depression since her teens and had attempted suicide before she ever had children. Things got seriously bad after her fourth child, Luke, was born in 1999. Her husband Rusty found her trembling and biting her fingers, and the next day she overdosed on pills. After a second hospitalization that summer, doctors diagnosed her with postpartum psychosis and put her on Haldol, an antipsychotic. Her psychiatrist told her plainly not to have any more children, warning it would likely trigger another, worse episode. She had a fifth child anyway, a daughter named Mary, in late 2000. Her father died a few months later, in March 2001, and Yates fell apart fast. By April she was self-harming, barely speaking, and neglecting her youngest daughter badly enough that she was hospitalized again. She was treated, discharged, and within weeks slid into what her doctors described as a near catatonic state. At one point she'd already considered drowning her children and talked herself out of it. She was hospitalized a second time that same week for suicidal thoughts. Houston Police Officers stand outside the house in Clear Lake City, where Andrea Yates drowned her 5 children. June 2001. A Preacher Who Mailed Them Cassette Tapes This is the part most retellings of the Yates case leave out, and it's the detail that actually explains the specific shape of her delusions. Years before the murders, Rusty Yates had become a follower of Michael Woroniecki, a travelling street preacher who lived out of a bus with his wife and mailed sermons on cassette tape to people he'd met on his travels. Woroniecki's core teaching was blunt: bad parents raise children who are doomed to hell, and the only people fit to escape that fate were the ones who lived in total submission to God. Rusty and Andrea kept in occasional contact with Woroniecki for years, mostly through those tapes and the odd letter. By the time Andrea's psychosis was at its worst in 2001, she'd become convinced she was a uniquely terrible mother and that her children's souls were already lost because of how she'd raised them. Drowning them, in her mind, wasn't murder. It was the only way left to save them from something worse. Woroniecki has always denied any meaningful involvement with the family, and he was never called as a witness or charged with anything. A recent documentary series reopened the question of how much influence he actually had, and he pushed back hard against it publicly, saying he barely knew Andrea and spoke mostly to Rusty. Russell and Andrea Yates with four of their five children (left to right): John, Luke, Paul and Noah. The Morning of June 20th Rusty left for work that morning, leaving Andrea alone with the children despite her psychiatrist's explicit instructions that she never be left unsupervised. His mother was due to arrive an hour later to help out. Within that hour, Andrea drowned all five children, starting with John, Paul and Luke, then Mary, and finally Noah, who'd come in to check on his baby sister and tried to run when he realized what was happening. Afterward she called the police and asked them to send an officer, then called Rusty and told him to come home. She didn't explain why on either call. The Testimony That Wasn't True Yates went to trial in 2002 on capital murder charges. The prosecution's central problem was simple: how do you convince a jury someone understood right from wrong when she was this visibly unwell? Their answer came from Dr. Park Dietz, a well known forensic psychiatrist who also worked as a consultant for the TV show Law & Order. Under cross examination, Dietz told the court he'd consulted on an episode where a mother with postpartum depression drowned her children in a bathtub and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and that the episode had aired just days before the Yates murders. The implication was obvious: Yates, a regular viewer of the show, had effectively watched a how-to. There was just one problem. The episode didn't exist. Suzanne O'Malley, a journalist who had previously worked on Law & Order herself and was covering the trial, couldn't find any record of it and started asking questions. Within hours of being alerted, Dietz checked with the show's own writers and confirmed his memory was wrong; he said later he'd offered to fly back to Houston at his own expense to correct it on the record, but his correction never made it into evidence before the verdict came in. By then it was too late to matter for the first trial. Both the defence and the prosecution had already built closing arguments around the fabricated episode. Yates' own lawyer told the jury they'd “heard some evidence that she saw some show on TV and knew she could drown her children and get away with it,” trying to get ahead of it, while the prosecutor leaned on it directly, telling jurors Yates watched the show regularly and had effectively been handed a blueprint. The jury convicted her of capital murder and, rather than the death penalty, sentenced her to life with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Overturned, and a Different Verdict In 2005, an appeals court ruled the false testimony could reasonably have swayed the jury and threw out the conviction. The state had to either retry Yates or let her go, and chose to retry her. Texas attorney Wendell Odom's account of the appeal notes that the state itself had already conceded in writing that Dietz's testimony was false and that no such episode had ever aired, which made the appeal close to a formality once it reached the right court. The 2006 retrial covered much of the same ground, but with a jury no longer anchored to a fabricated piece of evidence, and with a defence that leaned harder into just how thoroughly the system had already failed Andrea Yates before that morning ever happened. It came out that her psychiatrist, Dr. Mohammed Saeed, had explicitly told Rusty not to leave her alone with the children. Rusty had been doing it anyway for weeks beforehand, by his own account hoping it would help her regain a sense of independence. Andrea's brother later said Rusty had once described depressed people as simply needing “a swift kick in the pants,” a comment that didn't land well with a jury weighing whether anyone other than Andrea bore some responsibility for what happened in that house. Her own mother testified she'd warned Rusty he wasn't equipped to manage Andrea's care alone, after watching Andrea nearly choke baby Mary while distracted and unwell months earlier. This time, the jury found Yates not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to a state mental hospital and remains under psychiatric care today, at a low security facility in Kerrville, Texas. Rusty Yates remarried in 2006 What Actually Changed Between the Two Trials It's tempting to read the two verdicts as a story about a jury finally understanding mental illness. The more accurate read is narrower than that: the first trial was decided partly on a lie, and the second one wasn't. Once jurors weren't being told Yates had effectively copied a TV plot, the actual medical record, years of documented psychosis, repeated hospitalizations, a psychiatrist's explicit warning that was ignored, did the rest of the work. It's a pattern that shows up again in cases like Marianne Bachmeier's, where what a jury is told about a defendant's state of mind ends up mattering just as much as what actually happened. Texas juries don't have an easy relationship with the insanity defence generally; the state has historically been far more comfortable handing down the kind of sentence Karla Faye Tucker received than acquitting someone outright on mental health grounds. That makes the Yates retrial fairly unusual on its own terms, and probably wouldn't have happened at all without a journalist who used to work on a crime drama catching a fictional plotline being presented to a jury as fact. Sources 1. CNN: Andrea Yates case, witness at heart of appeal explains error 2. Psychiatric News: Inaccurate Expert Testimony Wins Yates New Trial 3. Wendell Odom: Andrea Yates, The Lie That Provided a Second Chance 4. Studicata: Yates v. State case brief 5. Biography.com: Who Is Michael Woroniecki 6. NHS: Postpartum Psychosis

On 4 July 1976, Israeli commandos flew over 2,500 miles to Uganda, landed at Entebbe Airport in the dead of night, and freed 102 hostages in under 90 minutes. The whole operation was planned in a week. The commandos wore Ugandan uniforms and drove a black Mercedes identical to Idi Amin's presidential car to get close to the terminal. They lost one of their own men. It remains one of the most studied special forces operations in military history. Air France Flight 139 On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 departed Tel Aviv for Paris with 248 passengers and 12 crew. It made a scheduled stop in Athens. During the stopover, four hijackers boarded: two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jayel al-Arja and Fayez Abdul-Rahim al-Jaber, and two members of the West German Revolutionary Cells, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann. Shortly after takeoff, Böse rushed the cockpit with a revolver and a hand grenade and declared the aircraft was now named "Haifa." The plane was diverted to Benghazi, Libya, where it refuelled over seven hours on the ground. One passenger was released there: a British-born Israeli woman named Patricia Martell, who had faked a miscarriage convincingly enough that the hijackers let her go. She immediately contacted Israeli intelligence with the first detailed information about who was in charge of the plane. Idi Amin After Benghazi the plane flew south for five hours, eventually landing at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda at 3.15pm on 28 June, more than 24 hours after the original departure. President Idi Amin, who had been quietly briefed in advance, was waiting on the tarmac to welcome the hijackers. At least four more PFLP operatives were already there to join them. Amin visited the hostages personally over the following days, presenting himself as a mediator while providing the hijackers with Ugandan soldiers, weapons, and logistical support. The Hijackers: Who Were Böse and Kuhlmann? The presence of two Germans among the hijackers was immediately noted and immediately uncomfortable. Böse and Kuhlmann were both founding members of the Revolutionäre Zellen, or Revolutionary Cells, a far-left German militant group that had participated the previous year in the Carlos the Jackal-led OPEC siege in Vienna. Böse had studied political science and sociology at Frankfurt and Freiburg, dropping out both times after a semester. He ran a left-wing bookshop in Frankfurt before going underground. Kuhlmann had studied pedagogy in Hanover and worked part-time caring for disabled children. Friends described her as warm, principled, and socially committed. Both had trained with the PFLP in South Yemen. Israeli commandos with a Mercedes-Benz 600 resembling the one owned by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, used by Sayeret Matkal to deceive Ugandan troops during the raid Their behaviour at Entebbe diverged dramatically. Kuhlmann, using the codename "Halima," was widely remembered by survivors for verbal abuse that several described as antisemitic in nature. Hostage Ilan Hartuv later said she "yelled and acted like a Nazi." Her former partner Gerd Schnepel later suggested she had felt pressure to appear tougher as a woman in a male-dominated operation. Böse, using the codename "Mahmood," was calmer and more conflicted. What happened when the hostages were separated would define how he was remembered. The Selection On 29 June, the hijackers separated the Israeli and Jewish hostages from the rest. Böse and Kuhlmann personally conducted the sorting, directing Israelis and those they identified as Jewish into an adjoining room while releasing the others. The parallels to Nazi selection processes at concentration camps were impossible to ignore, and several survivors said so explicitly. One of them was Yitzhak David, an Auschwitz survivor. He approached Böse, pulled up his sleeve, and showed him his camp tattoo. "I was mistaken when I told my children that there is a different Germany," he said. "When I see what you and your friends are doing to women, children and the elderly, I see that nothing has changed in Germany." Böse blanched. He trembled. "I'm no Nazi," he said. "I am an idealist." He went on to explain that he was opposed to the German government because it had allowed former Nazis to retain positions of power. The exchange lasted several minutes and was witnessed by multiple hostages. He also accepted, without protest, the decision by Air France captain Michel Bacos and his crew to remain voluntarily with the Israeli hostages rather than leave with the released passengers. Bacos, who had fought with de Gaulle's Free French during the war, said he saw a direct parallel between the Entebbe selection and what he'd witnessed in wartime. "I knew perfectly well what separation meant and what it would lead to," he said later. "I wasn't going to run off and leave my passengers to their fate." The final hostage count was 94 Israeli and Jewish passengers plus the 12 Air France crew. Around 150 non-Israeli, non-Jewish passengers were released and flown to Paris on 30 June. A 1994 photograph of the old terminal with a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules parked in front. Bullet holes from the 1976 raid are still visible. The Planning In Israel, the government was under enormous pressure. The hijackers' demands were the release of 40 Palestinian militants held in Israeli prisons plus 13 more held in four other countries. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin initially authorised negotiations as a stalling tactic. Defense Minister Shimon Peres pushed for a military option from the start. The man tasked with drawing up the military plan was Ehud Barak, then a senior officer who would later become Prime Minister. The key intelligence breakthrough came from released hostages and from a remarkable source: the Israeli construction firm Solel Boneh had built the Entebbe terminal in the 1960s and still had the original blueprints. The commandos could train on an exact replica of the building. They rehearsed the assault repeatedly in the days before the operation, timing every element down to the second. The force that would carry out the raid was Sayeret Matkal, Israel's elite special forces unit, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan called for four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to fly from Israel to Uganda, roughly 4,000km, at low altitude to avoid radar detection. They would land without lights. A black Mercedes Benz and two Land Rovers, painted to match Ugandan military vehicles, would drive from the plane directly to the terminal. Relatives pay last respects to Dora Bloch, 75, after she was murdered by officers of the Ugandan army. The planes left Israel at 1.20pm on 3 July 1976. The flight took seven hours at low altitude. The lead plane touched down at Entebbe at 11pm local time with its lights off, using the runway's landing lights that had been left on. The Mercedes and Land Rovers rolled out and drove toward the old terminal building, with Israeli commandos in Ugandan army uniforms. Two Ugandan sentries challenged the convoy. One was shot with a silenced pistol. He sat back up, wounded rather than dead. A second Israeli, unwilling to risk further noise, fired again with an unsilenced weapon. That shot ended the element of complete surprise, but the commandos were already close enough to the terminal that it didn't matter. The assault on the terminal took 53 seconds from the commandos entering to the last hijacker being killed. Böse, according to hostage Ilan Hartuv, was the only hijacker to enter the hostage hall when the shooting started. He initially pointed his Kalashnikov at the hostages, then almost immediately ordered them to take shelter in the restroom rather than firing. He was killed by Israeli commandos seconds later. Kuhlmann and the other hijackers in the adjoining room were killed when commandos threw grenades through the connecting door and entered firing. Three hostages were killed during the raid: Jean-Jacques Maimoni, a 19-year-old who stood up and was mistaken for a hijacker; Pasco Cohen, 52, hit by commando fire; and Ida Borochovitch, 56, killed by a hijacker in the crossfire. All seven hijackers were killed, along with around 45 Ugandan soldiers. The Israelis also destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG fighter jets on the ground to prevent pursuit. Yonatan Netanyahu was shot outside the terminal during the withdrawal, hit by a Ugandan soldier firing from the airport control tower. He was the only Israeli commando killed. The operation was renamed Operation Yonatan in his honour after his death. The hijackers, from left: Palestinians Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arja, Germans Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfried Bose. Yonatan's younger brother Benjamin Netanyahu, then 26 and studying at MIT, flew home immediately. He later said his brother's death was the moment that set the course of his entire political life. "Yoni's death was the central event of my life," he wrote in his memoir. He went on to found the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in his brother's memory, wrote a book on international terrorism dedicated to Yonatan, and built his entire political identity around the conviction that terrorism must be confronted without negotiation. He served as Israeli Prime Minister for longer than anyone in the country's history. The shadow of a single night at Entebbe airport runs through all of it. Dora Bloch Dora Bloch Dora Bloch was a 75-year-old British-Israeli dual citizen who had choked on a piece of food during the hostage crisis and been taken to Mulago Hospital in Kampala for treatment before the raid. When the Israeli commandos left Entebbe, she was still in hospital. She was not rescued. After news of the raid became public, Idi Amin ordered Dora Bloch murdered. She was dragged from her hospital bed by Ugandan security forces. Her body was found in a field outside Kampala after Amin's regime fell in 1979. She was eventually repatriated to Israel and buried there. The British government lodged a formal protest. Uganda broke off diplomatic relations with Britain in response. Idi Amin himself died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003, never prosecuted for the murder. Aftermath and Legacy The 102 rescued hostages and crew landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on 4 July 1976 to scenes that Israeli newspapers described as unprecedented. The operation was celebrated across much of the Western world as a demonstration of what a state could do when its citizens were threatened abroad. In the year that followed, Kuhlmann's codename "Halima" was adopted as the name of the commando unit that hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181 in 1977, demanding the same outcome: the release of far-left German prisoners. That operation also ended in a commando raid, this time by German GSG 9 forces, and also failed. Operation Entebbe sits alongside the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 as one of the defining moments of Israeli intelligence and special forces history: operations that required extraordinary planning, accepted enormous risk, and were carried out thousands of miles from home. The Eichmann operation brought a man to trial. Entebbe brought people home. Both demonstrated the same underlying conviction: that Israel would go wherever it needed to go to protect its people. Sources: 1. Wikipedia: Entebbe Raid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid 2. Wikipedia: Wilfried Böse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfried_B%C3%B6se 3. Wikipedia: Brigitte Kuhlmann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Kuhlmann 4. Reform Judaism: How a Holocaust Survivor Led a Hijacker to Confront His Conscience. https://reformjudaism.org/blog/how-holocaust-survivor-led-hijacker-confront-his-conscience 5. Middle East Forum: Who Were the Entebbe Hijackers? https://www.meforum.org/the-hijackers-of-entebbe-the-full-story 6. Militär Aktuell: Operation Entebbe — The Israeli Showpiece. https://militaeraktuell.at/en/operation-entebbe-the-israeli-showpiece/

On the night of July 2, 1969, Brian Jones threw a small party at his Sussex estate. There was food, there was alcohol, there were hash cakes. At some point after 9 p.m., he was found at the bottom of his swimming pool. By the time an ambulance arrived, he was dead. He was 27 years old. The coroner recorded a verdict of "death by misadventure" and cited drowning under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Most people accepted it, at least at the time. The man who'd founded and named the Rolling Stones, who'd played sitar on Paint It Black and dulcimer on Lady Jane, and who'd been fired from his own band less than a month earlier, had apparently drunk himself into a pool and drowned. Case closed. Except it wasn't, and still isn't. Brian Jones The Man Who Built the Rolling Stones Brian Jones was a middle-class kid from Cheltenham who moved to London in the early 1960s and did something nobody else had done: he assembled the Rolling Stones. He chose the members, named the band after a Muddy Waters song, booked their early gigs, and drove their initial direction. He also played a remarkable range of instruments across their early recordings, including sitar, dulcimer, harmonica, Mellotron, and recorder, often more convincingly than the musicians for whom those instruments were native. By the mid-1960s, though, the band's creative centre had shifted decisively to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Jones grew increasingly marginalised, and his drug and alcohol use spiralled in proportion. He accumulated six children with six different women, starting when he was sixteen. He was convicted twice on drug charges, in 1967 and 1968. His liver, by the time of his death, weighed twice the normal size. On June 8, 1969, Jagger, Richards, and Charlie Watts visited him at Cotchford Farm and told him he was out. He'd been making plans for a new band, reaching out to fellow musicians including John Lennon and Mitch Mitchell. Whether those plans were serious or hopeful is hard to say. Twenty-four days later, he was dead. Cotchford Farm and Frank Thorogood Jones had bought Cotchford Farm in November 1968 for £35,000. The 11-acre East Sussex estate had previously been the home of A.A. Milne, the Winnie-the-Pooh author, and Jones was genuinely delighted by that connection. He'd had the property's Christopher Robin statue restored and placed prominently in the garden. He saw the farm as somewhere to start over. What he got instead was Frank Thorogood. Thorogood was a builder brought in by Tom Keylock, the Rolling Stones' driver and fixer, to carry out renovation work on the property. Thorogood moved into the guest apartment with his girlfriend Janet Lawson, a nurse, and proceeded to do very little work while helping himself to Jones's pool, his hospitality, and his money. Jones grew increasingly frustrated with the pace of the job and the cost. On the day of his death, Jones sacked Thorogood and told him he wouldn't be paid for the work done until he'd vacated the property. The exact amount in dispute varies by source, but one account puts the total at around £18,000 already paid, with Thorogood pressing for a further £6,000. That evening, Jones, Thorogood, Lawson, and Anna Wohlin, Jones's Swedish girlfriend, were all present at the farm. Accounts of what happened between dinner and the moment Jones was found in the pool differ in almost every detail, depending on who's telling the story and when. The pool in which Jones drowned The Night of July 2nd The most cautious version of events, the one that produced the misadventure verdict, goes like this: Jones had been drinking heavily and had also consumed drugs, including barbiturates and amphetamines. He went for a late swim. He drowned. Lawson discovered his body. Thorogood and Wohlin pulled him from the pool. Resuscitation attempts failed. He was declared dead at the hospital. What complicates this are the specific things the autopsy found and didn't find. Jones's blood alcohol was significant but not exceptional for someone with his tolerance. His lungs contained fresh water, which matters because the pool at Cotchford was filled with chlorinated water, not fresh. The autopsy report also noted that the condition of the tissue and the heart showed signs consistent with a struggle. Biologists who later reviewed the death record for the 2019 documentary concluded that Jones appeared to have known he was being killed. There's also the question of the drugs found on Thorogood. When the police searched the scene, drugs squad officer PC Mike Harvey found five capsules of Durophet, a restricted amphetamine known as Black Bombers, inside Thorogood's coat. Thorogood told Harvey he was keeping them safe so Jones wouldn't take too many. Harvey later said a caution was issued rather than prosecution, an unusual decision for the era, made on the instruction of a senior officer. Janet Lawson, the nurse who found Jones in the pool, gave inconsistent accounts over the decades. In 2008, months before she died of cancer, she changed her story significantly, saying she believed Thorogood had killed Jones following the dispute over payment, and that a physical confrontation had taken place that evening. Wohlin, Jones's girlfriend, later said she believed Jones was alive when he was pulled from the pool, and that she could feel a pulse that the others on the scene dismissed. The Deathbed Confession Frank Thorogood died in November 1993. According to Tom Keylock, in the hours before his death Thorogood said: "It was me that did Brian. I just finally snapped." The confession was first reported in Terry Rawlings' 1994 book Who Killed Christopher Robin? and became the basis for the 2005 film Stoned, which dramatised the murder theory. Frank Thorogood Keylock later denied the confession ever happened. Given that Keylock himself was a significant figure at the scene that night, having arrived at Cotchford shortly after Jones was found, and given that he was accused separately of burning documents at the farm and leaving with a number of Jones's possessions including his Rolls-Royce, his credibility on all sides of the story is questionable. Keylock died on July 2, 2009, forty years almost to the day after Jones. Sussex Police reviewed the case in 1984 and again in 1994. In 2009, investigative journalist Scott Jones submitted new evidence including previously unseen police documents from the National Archives and testimony from individuals present at the farm that night. Sussex Police reviewed the case a third time and in 2010 declined to reopen it, stating there was no new evidence to suggest the coroner's original verdict was wrong. What the Family Believes Jones's daughter Barbara Marion, who only discovered who her father was in 2002, has been vocal about her belief that his death was not properly investigated. Around the 50th anniversary in 2019, she told Sky News: "I think he was murdered, and I think the police did not investigate it the way they should have." She appeared in the 2019 documentary Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones, which supports the murder theory and draws on the biological evidence from the autopsy. Jones's son John has also said he believes his father was killed. Their position is consistent with Anna Wohlin's account, with Janet Lawson's recanted testimony, and with the physical details that don't quite fit the official verdict. What it isn't consistent with is any prospect of prosecution. Thorogood is dead. Keylock is dead. The witnesses who might have filled the gaps are dead. As with so many cases of this era in British rock history, the full story probably died with the people who knew it. Jones's death marked the beginning of what became known as the 27 Club, the grim coincidence that claimed Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison within two years, all at the same age. The tiles from the Cotchford Farm pool were sold off when the estate was later renovated, at £100 each, the proceeds covering half the cost of the work. Jones's fans bought them all. Sources 1. Wikipedia: Brian Jones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Jones 2. CrimeReads: The Conspiracy Theories Around the Death of Brian Jones - https://crimereads.com/the-conspiracy-theories-around-the-death-of-brian-jones-50-years-later/ 3. All That's Interesting: Inside the Mystery of Brian Jones' Death - https://allthatsinteresting.com/brian-jones-death 4. American Songwriter: The Mystery Surrounding the 1969 Death of Brian Jones - https://americansongwriter.com/the-mystery-surrounding-the-1969-death-of-rolling-stones-guitarist-and-founder-brian-jones/ 5. Irish Star: Inside Rolling Stones Founder's Autopsy as Misadventure Mystery Revisited - https://www.irishstar.com/culture/entertainment/rolling-stones-brian-jones-autopsy-36972855 6. Rolling Stones Data: Frank Thorogood and Cotchford Farm - https://rollingstonesdata.com/articles/frank-thorogood-cotchford-farm-brian-jones-house/ 7. IORR: Brian Jones Death - Janet Lawson's Story - https://iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1623963,page=1

On 1 July 1996, a friend grew worried after Margaux Hemingway stopped answering her phone. She asked a worker at the Santa Monica apartment building to fetch a ladder so they could get in through the balcony. What they found inside was a body so badly decomposed that identifying it right away was difficult. The coroner could only confirm she had been dead for several days. When the toxicology report came back a month later, it showed phenobarbital levels so far above the therapeutic range that her body hadn't even digested all the pills before she died. She was 42. It was one day before the 35th anniversary of the suicide of her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway in 1976 The Hemingway Curse Margaux was the fifth member of the Hemingway family to take her own life. Her grandfather Ernest killed himself with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961. His father Clarence had shot himself in 1928. His brother Leicester took his own life in 1982. His sister Ursula did the same in 1966. The tabloids called it the Hemingway curse. Margaux herself once said she was "genetically programmed" for disaster. She grew up in Ketchum, on her grandfather's farm, in the long shadow of his name and his death. Her father Jack, Ernest's eldest son, was a conservationist and fisherman, and the family moved repeatedly, tracing the same geography Ernest had inhabited: Cuba, San Francisco, Idaho. Margaux had a difficult adolescence, struggling with depression, bulimia, epilepsy, and dyslexia from her teenage years. She self-medicated with alcohol. Due to her dyslexia, she never read many of her grandfather's books. "I am not a Hemingway aficionado," she once admitted. She also had a tense relationship with her mother Byra, and in the 1990s alleged that her father Jack had molested her as a child. Her father and stepmother denied it, stopped speaking to her, and her stepmother told People magazine, "She constantly lies. The whole family won't have anything to do with her." Her younger sister Mariel later confirmed in the 2013 documentary Running from Crazy that both Margaux and their older sister Muffet had been sexually abused by their father. None of this made it into the obituaries when Margaux died. The Name She was born Margot Louise Hemingway on 16 February 1954 in Portland, Oregon. When she found out, as a teenager, that her parents had named her after the Chateau Margaux wine they were drinking the night she was conceived, she changed the spelling to match. It was a small, telling gesture: the name was a piece of family mythology she decided to inhabit fully rather than escape. From Idaho to the Cover of Time She dropped out of high school and was working at a local PR firm in Idaho when, at 19, she accompanied her father on a business trip to New York and checked into the Plaza Hotel. There she met Errol Wetson, founder of a fast-food hamburger chain, who was immediately taken with her looks, her six-foot frame, and her husky voice. Four months later she had moved to New York to live with him, initially staying in an apartment on East 72nd Street owned by heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Through Wetson's connections she was introduced to Francesco Scavullo, Halston, and Marian McEvoy at Women's Wear Daily. Within months, her face was on the cover of Vogue. Fashion artist Joe Eula said in 1975 that Margaux had "the face of a generation, as recognisable and memorable as Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Shrimpton." In June 1975, just turned 20, she signed with Fabergé as the face of Babe perfume for one million dollars. It was the largest advertising contract ever awarded to a model, and it made her the highest-paid model in the world at the time. The New Yorker called it "the largest single advertising contract ever involving a female personality." She and Wetson married in Paris that same year. In June 1975, Time magazine put her on the cover, dubbing her "The New Beauty." Over the following eight months, articles about Margaux Hemingway appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, People, and Vogue. It was a level of saturation that owed as much to the famous surname as to anything else, and it wouldn't last. Cary Grant and Margaux Hemingway, 1976 Studio 54 and the Fall At the peak of her modelling career, Margaux became a fixture at Studio 54, partying with Bianca Jagger, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, and Andy Warhol. It was there that the drinking, already a problem, accelerated into something else. She eventually lost her Fabergé contract, in part because her public image as a perpetually drunk figure at the club had become difficult to separate from the fresh, aspirational appeal the brand needed. In 1976, she made her film debut in Lipstick, a rape and revenge thriller directed by Lamont Johnson, in which she played a fashion model terrorised by a rapist. She had suggested her 14-year-old sister Mariel for a supporting role. The film was dismissed as exploitation. Critics were harsh about Margaux's performance. They were not harsh about Mariel's. Press attention that had been fixed on Margaux shifted almost overnight to her younger sister, who went on to a successful film and television career while Margaux struggled to find roles. She divorced Wetson in 1978. On New Year's Eve 1979 she married French filmmaker Bernard Faucher and moved to Paris. That marriage lasted six years before ending in divorce in 1985. The 1980s were a succession of low-budget films, Killer Fish with Lee Majors, They Call Me Bruce?, Over the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued appearances in the gossip columns for the wrong reasons. In 1984 she suffered serious injuries in a skiing accident. In 1988 she was treated at the Betty Ford Center. Searching for Something In 1990, she appeared on the cover of Playboy, an attempt to generate heat around a flagging career. It didn't change much. Through the 1990s she made infomercials, appeared at store openings and film festivals in South America, India, and Italy, and endorsed a psychic hotline. She was rootless and perpetually in motion. Friends described her as "the hardest person to ground," spiritually searching and gullible about it, drawn to gurus and healers and the Agape Church of Religious Science in Santa Monica. In 1994 she went to India and suffered some kind of breakdown, and was treated at a private psychiatric clinic in Idaho, from which she was released in 1995. She moved to California and was working towards hosting a wildlife adventure series for the Discovery Channel called Wild Guide. People who saw her in the final months said she seemed happier than she had in years. She had also allowed a video recording of a therapy session about her bulimia to be broadcast on television. She made the sexual abuse allegations against her father public. She was, in her way, trying to deal with things. The Death In the last days of June 1996, she made phone calls to several friends, leaving what were described as rambling messages. Nobody thought much of it at the time. She had just moved to a new studio apartment in Santa Monica with an ocean view, evicted from a previous place she hated because it overlooked a car park. The new flat was small but she was pleased with it. When her friend Judy Stabile couldn't reach her over the weekend and grew concerned, she and others arranged to get in through the balcony. The coroner estimated Margaux had died on the night of 28 June or the early hours of 29 June, several days before she was found. The toxicology report, released in August, listed cause of death as "acute phenobarbital intoxication." The bottle found by her bedside was not prescribed. The drug levels in her body were, in the coroner's words, "well above therapeutic levels." The coroner ruled it suicide. Mariel's then-husband told People that Margaux had seemed better than she had in years. Mariel herself disputed the ruling for years, believing it could have been an accidental overdose of the epilepsy medication she'd taken since childhood. On Larry King Live in 2005, she said she had come to accept it was suicide. Margaux was cremated. Her ashes were buried in the Hemingway family plot at Ketchum Cemetery in Idaho, a short walk from the memorial to her grandfather. She was the fifth Hemingway to die by suicide, after her grandfather Ernest, his father Clarence, his brother Leicester, and his sister Ursula. Legacy The Hemingway family's record across four generations is one of the most documented examples of inherited trauma and suicide in public life. Audrey Munson, often called America's first supermodel, spent decades in a psychiatric institution after a similarly sudden fall from extraordinary early fame. Margaux's story is different in its specifics but recognisable in its shape: the name that opened every door, the career that peaked before she'd had time to understand what she wanted from it, the substances that filled the gap, and the sense that the story was already written. "I'm a Hemingway," she once said. "I know all about addiction. We all have the curse of alcoholism." And separately, asked about the family's shadow: "You can't escape the Hemingway curse." She said both things matter-of-factly, without self-pity, which might have been the saddest part of all. Sources: 1. Wikipedia: Margaux Hemingway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaux_Hemingway 2. Psychology Today: What Killed Margaux Hemingway? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199612/what-killed-margaux-hemingway 3. Encyclopedia.com: Hemingway, Margaux. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/hemingway-margaux 4. Los Angeles Times: Margaux Hemingway Dies at 42. July 2, 1996. 5. Hemingway, Mariel. Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family. Regan Arts, 2015

Charles Domery, also known as Charles Domerz, was born in Benche, Poland, around 1778. Starting at the age of 13, Domery displayed an exceptionally large appetite. He was one of nine brothers, all of whom he claimed had the same condition. Domery remembered that his father had a hearty appetite and typically ate his meat half-boiled, although he couldn't recall the exact quantity. The only illness Domery knew of in the family was a bout of smallpox during his youth, from which everyone recovered. Despite his peculiar eating habits, doctors described Domery as having a normal physique and being tall for the era, standing at 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m). He had long, brown hair, grey eyes, smooth skin, and a "pleasant countenance." Observing physicians found no signs of mental illness in Domery, and although he was illiterate, his intelligence was deemed normal by his peers and the prison doctors who examined him. Despite his enormous food intake, it was observed that Domery never vomited, except when consuming large quantities of roasted or boiled meat. He appeared to be in good health, with lively eyes, a clean tongue, a regular pulse of around 84 BPM, and a normal body temperature. While his muscles were noted to be slightly weaker than average, during his military service, he managed to march 14 French leagues (approximately 25 mi/42 km) in a day without any adverse effects. At the age of 13, Domery joined the Prussian Army and participated in the siege of Thionville during the War of the First Coalition. The Prussian Army faced food shortages that Domery could not tolerate, prompting him to surrender to the French commander. In return, he received a large melon which he promptly consumed, including the rind. Subsequently, the French general provided Domery with various food items, all of which he devoured immediately. In one year, [Domery] devoured 174 cats (not their skins) dead or alive; and says, he had several severe conflicts of interest in the act of destroying them, by feeling the effects of their torments on his face and hands: sometimes, he killed them before eating, but when very hungry, did not wait to perform this humane office. Testimony of M. Picard, who served with Domery throughout his service in the French Army and was interned with him in Liverpool. Domery later joined the French Revolutionary Army, astonishing his fellow soldiers with his peculiar eating habits and insatiable appetite. Despite receiving double rations and buying extra food with his pay, he still experienced severe hunger. While stationed near Paris, he consumed 174 cats in a year, leaving only the skins and bones, and resorted to eating 4 to 5 pounds of grass daily when other food was scarce. His preference was for raw meat over cooked, with raw bullock's liver being his favorite dish, although he would consume any available meat. While aboard the French ship Hoche, a sailor lost his leg to cannon fire, and Domery seized the severed limb and began eating it until another crew member intervened and tossed it into the sea. In October 1798, the Royal Navy led by Sir John Borlase Warren captured the Hoche near the coast of Ireland, resulting in the internment of Domery and others in a prison camp close to Liverpool.Domery's extraordinary appetite surprised the British guards, who eventually agreed to double his rations. Despite this increase, his hunger persisted, leading to a further augmentation of his daily food allowance to that of ten men. During this period, prisoners of war were provided rations by the country of the army they had served in. A French prisoner typically received a daily ration of 26 ounces (740 g) of bread, half a pound (230 g) of vegetables, and 2 ounces (57 g) of butter or 6 ounces (170 g) of cheese. Domery's insatiable hunger led him to consume the prison cat and "at least 20 rats" that entered his cell. He also ingested the medications of fellow prisoners who declined to take them, seemingly without any negative consequences. Records indicate that he would even eat the candles from the prison. The prison commander alerted the Sick and Hurt Commissioners, who were in charge of medical services in the Royal Navy and the well-being of prisoners of war, about his unusual captive. Dr. J. Johnston and Dr. Cochrane, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, conducted an experiment to assess Domery's eating capacity and his ability to tolerate unconventional foods. Domery was woken up at 4:00 am and consumed 4 lbs (1.8 kg) of raw cow's udder without hesitation. Subsequently, at 9:30 am, he ate a meal consisting of 5 lbs (2.3 kg) of raw beef, twelve large tallow candles weighing one pound (453 g) in total, and a bottle of porter. At 1:00 pm, Domery consumed another meal comprising 5 lbs of beef, a pound (453 g) of candles, and three large bottles of porter. Remarkably, throughout the experiment, he did not defecate, urinate, or vomit, maintaining a regular pulse and consistent skin temperature. After the experiment, when Domery returned to his quarters at 6:15 pm, he was described as being in high spirits, engaging in dancing, smoking his pipe, and consuming an additional bottle of porter. The eagerness with which he attacks his beef when his stomach is not gorged, resembles the voracity of a hungry wolf, tearing off and swallowing it with canine greediness. When his throat is dry from continued exercise, he lubricates it by stripping the grease off the candles between his teeth, which he generally finishes at three mouthfuls, and wrapping the wick like a ball, string and all, sends it after at a swallow. He can, when no choice is left, make shift to dine on immense quantities of raw potatoes or turnips; but, from choice, would never desire to taste bread or vegetables. Dr J. Johnston While the cause of Domery's appetite has not been officially diagnosed, polyphagia (excessive appetite) is one suggested option. Jan Bondeson, the Swedish-British rheumatologist, scientist and author, speculated in 2006 that Domery possibly suffered from a damaged amygdala or ventromedial nucleus; injuries to the amygdala or ventromedial nucleus in animals has been known to induce polyphagia. After his captivity, Domery's fate remains undocumented. It is known that the Napoleonic Wars continued to rage across Europe, and many soldiers like Domery faced uncertain futures. Some prisoners of war were repatriated or assimilated into their captor's forces, while others struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Sources Cochrane, Thomas. Observations on Charles Domery. Medical Society of Liverpool, 1799. Wright, Jonathan. Weird Cases in Medical History. Harvard University Press, 2007. Moore, Wendy. The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery. Broadway Books, 2006.

St. John's Dance, also known as the "Dancing Plague," stands as one of the most enigmatic and perplexing occurrences in medieval European history. This peculiar phenomenon, which saw groups of people dancing uncontrollably for extended periods, has puzzled historians and scholars for centuries. Its origins, causes, and consequences provide a fascinating glimpse into the social and medical history of Europe. The earliest recorded instance of St. John's Dance dates back to the 7th century, but it is most famously documented during the late medieval period, particularly in the 14th and 16th centuries. The most notable outbreak occurred in July 1518 in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Frau Troffea, a resident of Strasbourg, suddenly began dancing fervently in the streets. Her unrestrained movements continued for days, and within a week, dozens of others had joined her. Contemporary reports suggest that the dancers seemed unable to stop, often collapsing from exhaustion, only to resume their frantic motions shortly after. These episodes were not confined to Strasbourg alone. Similar outbreaks were reported across Europe, from the Rhine Valley to the Netherlands, and even in parts of Italy. The communal and contagious nature of these events drew the attention of both local authorities and scholars, who sought to understand the underlying causes. Eyewitness accounts describe the scenes of the dancing plagues with a mix of horror and fascination. Participants, often appearing in a trance-like state, danced relentlessly for days, sometimes weeks. They exhibited a range of symptoms, including extreme exhaustion, muscle spasms, hallucinations, and in severe cases, death due to heart attack, stroke, or sheer physical fatigue. The dancers seemed oblivious to their surroundings, and their movements ranged from frenzied jumping and hopping to more rhythmic steps that resembled traditional dances of the time. Medical practitioners of the era, such as the renowned Paracelsus, attempted to treat the afflicted with various methods, from bloodletting to herbal remedies. Religious interventions were also common, with processions and prayers being organized in hopes of divine intervention. In some regions, musicians were even hired to accompany the dancers, in a bizarre attempt to control the rhythm and perhaps guide the dance to a less harmful conclusion. According to The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, originally published in 1888. In the book, Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker imaginatively describes the spectacle of St. John's dance as follows: They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. The causes of St. John's Dance have been the subject of intense debate and speculation. Several theories have been proposed over the centuries: Ergotism: One of the most widely accepted theories involves ergot poisoning, caused by consuming rye contaminated with the fungus Claviceps purpurea. Ergot contains alkaloids that can induce hallucinations, convulsions, and other symptoms akin to those observed in the dancing plagues. Historian John Waller, in his extensive research, supports this hypothesis, noting the correlation between the regions affected by the dance and those with a history of ergot outbreaks. Mass Hysteria: Another plausible explanation is mass psychogenic illness, or mass hysteria. This theory suggests that the dancing plagues were a form of collective psychological response to the extreme stress and hardships of the time. Europe in the medieval period was rife with famine, disease (notably the Black Death), and social upheaval. The shared trauma could have triggered a communal, uncontrollable expression of anxiety and distress through dance. Religious and Superstitious Beliefs: The medieval mindset, deeply rooted in religious and superstitious beliefs, may have also played a crucial role. St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancers, was often invoked during these episodes. Some believed that the dance was a curse or divine punishment, leading afflicted individuals to dance until absolution or divine mercy was granted. The association with religious festivals, particularly around the feast day of St. John the Baptist, further underscores the spiritual dimensions of this phenomenon. Numerous anecdotes from the time illustrate the bizarre and tragic nature of St. John's Dance. One account from Strasbourg in 1518 describes how authorities, desperate to curb the epidemic, constructed a stage and hired professional dancers and musicians, hoping that organized, supervised dancing would exhaust the participants and bring an end to the chaos. Instead, it seemed to exacerbate the situation, drawing even more people into the frenzy. A chronicler from Aachen, writing about an earlier outbreak in 1374, noted with bewilderment: “Many of these people danced until they broke their ribs and suffered acute abdominal pain, shrieking in agony and eventually succumbing to death.” The Dancing Plague remains a topic of scholarly intrigue due to its multifaceted nature. As Professor Robert E. Bartholomew aptly puts it, "St. John's Dance is a window into the psychological and social landscapes of the medieval mind. It forces us to consider the powerful intersection of belief, environment, and the human psyche." St. John's Dance is a testament to the complexities of human behaviour and the enduring mysteries of history. Whether seen as a consequence of environmental factors, psychological stress, or deep-seated religious beliefs, it serves as a poignant reminder of how collective experiences can manifest in extraordinary and, at times, inexplicable ways. The dance may have ended centuries ago, but the questions it raises continue to captivate and challenge scholars to this day. Sources Waller, John. A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. Icon Books, 2008. Bartholomew, Robert E., and Erich Goode. Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566. McFarland, 2000. Hecker, Justus Friedrich Karl. The Epidemics of the Middle Ages. Trübner & Co., 1888. Dyer, Thomas G. The Dance of Death and Other Plant Poisonings. Indiana University Press, 1986.

When Ringo Starr fell ill with tonsillitis and was hospitalised on 3 June 1964, just before the Beatles' 1964 tour of Australia, the band's manager Brian Epstein and their producer George Martin urgently discussed the possibility of using a replacement drummer instead of canceling part of the tour. Martin recommended Jimmie Nicol, whom he had recently worked with on a recording session with Tommy Quickly. Nicol had also played drums on a budget label album as part of an uncredited session band, as well as an extended play single of Beatles cover versions marketed as 'Teenagers Choice' titled Beatlemania, which meant he was already familiar with the songs and arrangements. Challenges Faced and Memories Shared While John Lennon and Paul McCartney quickly agreed to the idea of using a temporary replacement, George Harrison threatened to withdraw from the tour, telling Epstein and Martin: "If Ringo's not going, then neither am I. You can find two replacements." Martin remembered: "They almost didn't go on the Australia tour. George is very loyal. Brian and I had to persuade George that not going would be a letdown for everyone." Tony Barrow, the Beatles' press officer at the time, later remarked: "Brian saw it as the lesser of two evils; cancel the tour and disappoint thousands of fans or proceed and upset the Beatles." Starr mentioned that "it was very odd, them going without me. They took Jimmie Nicol, and I felt unloved – all those thoughts crossed my mind." The arrangements were made swiftly, from a phone call to Nicol at his home in West London inviting him to an audition/rehearsal at Abbey Road Studios, to packing his bags, all on the same day. During a press conference, a reporter playfully asked John Lennon why Pete Best, the Beatles' former drummer for two years who was let go by the group just before they became famous, wasn't rehired. Lennon responded: "He has his own group [Pete Best & the All Stars], and it might have seemed like we were taking him back, which wouldn't be good for him." Life as a Temporary Beatle Nicol's first performance with the Beatles happened only 27 hours later on 4 June at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was styled with the iconic Beatle moptop haircut, dressed in Starr's suit, and took the stage in front of 4,500 Beatles fans. McCartney remembered: "He was perched on this platform checking out all the ladies. We would start 'She Loves You': [counting in] 'one, two', nothing, 'one, two', and still nothing!" Their set was shortened from eleven songs to ten, omitting Starr's vocal part in "I Wanna Be Your Man." McCartney jokingly sent Starr a telegram saying: "Get well soon Ringo, Jimmy is wearing out all your suits." Reflecting later on the fleeting nature of his sudden fame, Nicol remarked: "The day before I was a Beatle, girls didn't care about me at all. The day after, with the suit and the Beatle cut, riding in the limo with John and Paul, they were eager to touch me. It was very strange and quite intimidating." He also shared insights on how they spent their time between shows: ""I thought I could drink and lay women like the best of them until I got caught up with these guys." Post-Beatles Experience and Reflections In the Netherlands, Nicol and Lennon reportedly spent an entire night at a brothel. Lennon recalled: "It was a wild scene on the road. Satyricon! There are photos of me crawling around Amsterdam on my knees, coming out of brothels, and people saying 'Good morning John.' The police escorted me to these places because they didn't want a scandal. When we hit town, we hit it – we weren't fooling around. We had the women. They were fantastic." Nicol discovered that, aside from being a Beatle, he could explore like any other tourist: "I often went out alone. Hardly anyone recognised me, and I could wander freely. In Hong Kong, I visited the boat-dwellers in the harbour, saw the refugees in Kowloon, and went to a nightclub. I enjoy experiencing life. A Beatle could never truly do that." Nicol performed a total of eight shows until Starr rejoined the group in Melbourne, Australia, on 14 June. He couldn't bid farewell to the Beatles as they were still asleep when he departed, and he didn't want to disturb them. At Melbourne Airport, Epstein gave him a £500 check (equivalent to $12,798 in 2023) and a gold Eterna-matic wristwatch engraved: "From the Beatles and Brian Epstein to Jimmy – with appreciation and gratitude." George Martin later praised Nicol while acknowledging the challenges he faced in readjusting to a normal life: "Jimmie Nicol was a very talented drummer who quickly learned Ringo's parts. He did an excellent job and then faded into obscurity right after." Paul McCartney remembered: "It wasn't easy for Jimmy to step in for Ringo and suddenly be famous. And as soon as his time was over, he wasn't famous anymore." Nicol himself expressed disillusionment years later: "Substituting for Ringo was the worst thing that happened to me. Before that, I was content earning £30 or £40 a week. When the headlines faded, I started fading too." He chose not to capitalise on his short-lived fame. Despite financial struggles after his time with the band, Nicol refrained from exploiting his Beatles connection. In a rare interview from 1987, he expressed his gratitude towards the band, stating that he didn't want to take advantage of their success or overshadow their contributions to his career. During Jimmie's time with The Beatles, Paul would inquire about his well-being after every performance, to which Jimmie consistently responded, "It's getting better." Three years later, while walking Paul's dog Martha with the Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, McCartney noticed the sun shining and remarked that the weather was "getting better." This moment triggered McCartney's memory of Nicol, leading him to compose the song "Getting Better," which later featured on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The world of clowns is one of whimsical artistry, boundless humour, and a touch of the surreal. Yet, nestled within this vibrant tapestry is a curious tradition that intersects the realms of art and intellectual property in a uniquely tangible way: the practice of copyrighting clown make-up designs by painting them on eggs. This unusual custom, which began in the mid-20th century, offers not only a practical solution for preserving and protecting the distinct personas of clowns but also serves as a fascinating cultural artefact in its own right. The Genesis of the Clown Egg Registry The origin of the clown egg tradition can be traced back to 1946, when Stan Bult, a member of what was then known as the International Circus Clowns Club (now Clowns International), embarked on an unconventional hobby. Bult, with an eye for detail and a passion for clowning, began painting the distinctive make-up designs of his fellow clowns onto emptied-out chicken eggs. Initially, this endeavour was purely recreational, a pastime that allowed Bult to celebrate the unique visages of his peers. Bult's hobby, however, soon evolved into something much more significant. As he meticulously recreated the make-up designs on these fragile canvases, it became apparent that these painted eggs served as an invaluable record. Each egg encapsulated the individuality and creativity of a specific clown, preserving their unique make-up for posterity. This was not merely a collection of artistic representations; it was a memorial to the clowns of yore, ensuring that their iconic faces would not be lost to time. The Practicality of Preserving Persona The tradition initiated by Bult quickly gained traction within the clowning community. It addressed a very real concern: the need to protect the intellectual property of a clown's persona. In the world of performance, a clown's make-up is akin to their signature, a visual trademark that distinguishes them from their peers. By painting these designs onto eggs, clowns could effectively copyright their make-up, providing a physical and verifiable record of their artistic identity. This practice offered several advantages. Firstly, it ensured that the unique make-up designs could be authenticated and preserved. Secondly, it provided a historical archive, a way to document the evolution of clown artistry over the decades. Finally, it fostered a sense of community and continuity among clowns, linking the past with the present through these delicate yet enduring symbols. A Fragile Legacy Stan Bult's initial collection comprised around 200 eggs, each meticulously painted to capture the essence of the clown it represented. However, the inherent fragility of the medium meant that many of these eggs were lost or broken over the years. Despite this, a remarkable number of these original eggs have survived, serving as a testament to Bult's vision and the enduring appeal of this tradition. The Modern Home of the Clown Egg Collection Today, 26 of Bult's original eggs are housed in the Holy Trinity Church in Dalston, London, where they are preserved as part of a larger collection. This church, with its serene ambiance, provides a fitting sanctuary for these delicate works of art. The display is not just a historical archive but a living tribute to the artistry and individuality of clowns from around the world. In addition to the 26 originals, there are another 46 clown eggs on permanent display, representing a broader spectrum of clowning history and artistry. This collection is curated and maintained by Clowns International, ensuring that the legacy of these performers continues to be honoured and remembered.

Alexander the Great, one of history's most enigmatic figures, met his untimely demise in June 323 B.C. The circumstances surrounding his death have been the subject of speculation and intrigue for centuries. This detailed reconstruction of Alexander's last days provides an in-depth look at the events leading up to his death, drawing from various ancient sources. Days Before the Poisoning (Before 17 Daesius, May 31, 323 B.C.) Antipater's Plot: Antipater, a high-ranking Macedonian official, harboured intentions to poison Alexander. This is suggested by Arrian and Justin, who highlight Antipater's motive and fear of Alexander's growing power. Aristotle's Involvement: The renowned philosopher Aristotle, fearing Alexander's wrath over the execution of his nephew Callisthenes, allegedly provided the poison to Antipater. This is detailed in Arrian's accounts. Alexander's Return to Babylon: Alexander returned to Babylon and indulged in nightly banquets for several days. Justin mentions these feasts as part of Alexander's routine. Cassander's Role: Antipater sent his son Cassander to Babylon with specific instructions on how to poison Alexander. The poison was concealed in the hoof of a mule, according to Arrian and Justin. Cassander's Arrival: Upon reaching Babylon, Cassander presented gifts to Alexander, a gesture noted by the "Life of Alexander" by Callisthenes of Olynthus The Meeting with Iollas: Cassander met with his brother Iollas, Alexander's wine-pourer, revealing their father's plot. Iollas agreed to participate due to a personal affront he had received from Alexander, as chronicled by Callisthenes, Curtius, and Arrian. The Banquet Plan: Cassander instructed Medius, a Thessalian and lover of Iollas, to organize a banquet where Iollas could administer the poison. This plan is supported by Justin, Callisthenes, and Arrian. Day 0: 17 Daesius (May 31, 323 B.C.) Sacrifices and Divination: Alexander performed customary animal sacrifices and sought divine guidance. Diodorus and Arrian note these rituals. Distribution of Victims and Wine: Alexander distributed sacrificial victims and wine to his troops, a gesture of camaraderie documented by Arrian. Evening Banquet with Nearchus: Alexander dined with Nearchus in the evening, as mentioned by Justin and Arrian. Post-Banquet Bath: Following the banquet, Alexander took his customary bath before bed, a routine noted by Plutarch. Medius' Invitation: Medius invited Alexander to continue reveling at his house. This invitation and Alexander's acceptance are detailed by Justin, Diodorus, Arrian, and Plutarch. The Conspirators: The banquet hosted several guests, including Iollas' accomplices. They were fearful of Alexander's increasing power and had previously discussed his assassination, according to the pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian. The Poisoned Cup: Iollas, tasked with preparing Alexander's wine, added the poison to the drink. This act is chronicled by Curtius, Diodorus, and Arrian. Alexander Drinks the Poison: Alexander reclined at the banquet as Iollas handed him the poisoned cup. He drank it, and after a brief conversation, he cried out in pain as if struck by an arrow in his abdomen. This dramatic moment is recounted by the pseudo-Callisthenes, Diodorus, and Arrian. Immediate Aftermath: Suffering from intense pain, Alexander retired to his room, experiencing diarrhoea or vomiting and taking another bath. The pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian detail these events. Return to the Banquet: Despite the pain, Alexander returned to the banquet, urging his friends to continue drinking. This resilience is noted by Arrian. Guests' Departure: The conspirators, guilt-ridden and fearful, left the banquet early. The pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian describe their anxiety. Vomiting Attempt: Alexander, feeling unwell, requested a feather to induce vomiting, a method he occasionally used. The pseudo-Callisthenes notes this attempt. Increasing Pain: Unable to find relief, Alexander's pain intensified, and he was carried back to his apartments by his friends, half-dead and in excruciating agony. Diodorus and Justin detail this harrowing experience. Night of Suffering: Alexander spent the night in great discomfort and acute suffering, with his physicians unable to alleviate his pain. The pseudo-Callisthenes and Diodorus provide insights into this night. Cassander's Departure: Cassander, after conferring with his brother, left Babylon, waiting in the Cilician Mountains for news of Alexander's death. The pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian discuss Cassander's strategic retreat. Report to Antipater: Cassander sent a letter to his father Antipater, cryptically confirming the successful execution of their plan. The pseudo-Callisthenes notes the content of this message. Day 1: 18 Daesius (June 1, 323 B.C.) Morning Meeting: At dawn, Alexander sought counsel with his friends but was unable to make a testament due to paralysis of his tongue. He ordered everyone to leave his bedroom to make his own decisions. This event is recorded by the pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian. Evening Banquet: Feeling better, Alexander supped and drank at Medius' house until late into the night, as mentioned by Arrian. Drinking Contest: During the dinner, Alexander engaged in a drinking contest, pledging the health of everyone and accepting numerous toasts. Arrian and Athenaeus (At) provide details of this event. Bowl of Heracles: Alexander called for a six-quart cup, known as the bowl of Heracles, and drank bravely. However, he soon collapsed back on his cushion, unable to finish the drink. Athenaeus, Diodorus, and Plutarch recount this incident. Bath and Sleep: After the drinking party, Alexander took a bath, ate a little food, and slept there, already feeling feverish. Athenaeus, Arrian, and Plutarch describe his condition. Day 2: 19 Daesius (June 2, 323 B.C.) Morning Rituals: Alexander took another bath and offered the customary animal sacrifices, as noted by Arrian and Plutarch. Dice Game with Medius: Alexander spent the day playing dice with Medius in his bed-chamber, a detail provided by Arrian and Plutarch. Meeting with Officers: Alexander ordered his officers to meet him at daybreak, as documented by Arrian. Evening Routine: Late in the evening, Alexander performed his sacrifices, ate supper, and was conveyed to bed. The fever raged throughout the night. Arrian and Plutarch detail his worsening condition. Day 3: 20 Daesius (June 3, 323 B.C.) Morning Sacrifice: Alexander took a bath and offered his customary sacrifices, as recorded by Arrian and Plutarch. Orders for the Voyage: He gave orders to Nearchus and other officers to prepare for the upcoming voyage. Arrian notes these instructions. Conversation with Nearchus: Alexander listened to Nearchus recount his voyage and the wonders of the sea. Plutarch provides details of this conversation. Day 4: 21 Daesius (June 4, 323 B.C.) Morning Sacrifice: Alexander bathed and offered sacrifices, continuing his daily routine despite his fever, as mentioned by Arrian and Plutarch. Meeting with Officers: He summoned his officers, instructing them to prepare for the fleet's departure. Arrian records this meeting. Evening Illness: Alexander's condition worsened in the evening, with Roxane, his wife, applying a poultice to his stomach for relief. This act is noted by the pseudo-Callisthenes and Arrian. Day 5: 22 Daesius (June 5, 323 B.C.) High Fever: Alexander's fever was very high. He was carried out on his bed to perform the sacrifices, as recorded by Arrian and Plutarch. Officers' Meeting: Despite his illness, Alexander summoned his officers to discuss the expedition and the army's vacant posts. Plutarch provides details of these conversations. Journey to the River: Alexander was carried to the river, where he sailed across to the park (northern palace) and took a bath before resting. Arrian describes this journey. Day 6: 23 Daesius (June 6, 323 B.C.) Morning Sacrifice: With difficulty, Alexander performed the morning sacrifices and gave further orders about the voyage, as noted by Arrian. Day 7: 24 Daesius (June 7, 323 B.C.) Realising His End: Aware of his impending death, Alexander planned to cast himself into the Euphrates, hoping his disappearance would perpetuate the myth of his divine origins. Roxane, however, intercepted him. This dramatic event is detailed by the pseudo-Callisthenes. Roxane's Persuasion: Roxane convinced Alexander to return to his quarters, expressing her distress over his plan. The pseudo-Callisthenes provides an account of this conversation. Return to Bed: Alexander, feeling the pull of fate, returned to bed, as documented by the pseudo-Callisthenes. Day 8: 25 Daesius (June 8, 323 B.C.) Testament Planning: Alexander summoned key generals, including Perdiccas and Ptolemy, to draft his testament. Arrian and Plutarch note this crucial meeting. Address to the Army: Despite his severe condition, Alexander addressed his soldiers, sharing messages of reassurance and concern for their families. Arrian and Plutarch describe this emotional address. Final Orders: After the address, Alexander handed his signet ring to Perdiccas, indicating his choice of successor. Arrian and Plutarch provide details of this significant act. Day 9: 26 Daesius (June 9, 323 B.C.) Silent Suffering: Alexander spent the day speechless and feverish, his condition rapidly deteriorating. Arrian and Plutarch note his silent suffering. Day 10: 27 Daesius (June 10, 323 B.C.) Soldiers' Visit: Desperate to see their king one last time, Alexander's soldiers forced their way into the palace. Alexander, though weak, greeted them, lifting his hand in acknowledgment. Arrian and Plutarch provide accounts of this poignant visit. Handing Over the Ring: After the soldiers' visit, Alexander handed his ring to Perdiccas, solidifying his succession plans. Arrian and Plutarch describe this final gesture. Day 11: 28 Daesius (June 11, 323 B.C.) Consulting the Oracle: Alexander's friends consulted the oracle of Serapis, seeking guidance on whether Alexander should be moved to the temple. The oracle advised against it, suggesting that Alexander should remain where he was. Arrian and Plutarch recount this consultation. Alexander's Death: Later that day, Alexander the Great passed away, marking the end of an era. Arrian, Plutarch, and Diodorus provide detailed accounts of his final moments and death. The death of Alexander the Great was a culmination of political intrigue, personal vendettas, and his indomitable spirit. Despite severe illness, Alexander continued to perform his kingly duties, demonstrating extraordinary resilience. His death left a significant power vacuum, leading to the fragmentation of his vast empire. Sources Arrian. Anabasis Alexandri. Curtius Rufus, Quintus. Histories of Alexander the Great. Diodorus Siculus. Bibliotheca historica. Justin (Marcus Junianus Justinus). Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. Plutarch. Parallel Lives, "Life of Alexander". Pseudo-Callisthenes. Alexander Romance. Athenaeus. Deipnosophistae.