Margareth Geertruida Zelle ( August 7, 1876- October 15, 1917) is the most famous and controversial spy of World War One. She was also known as Mata Hari, a Dutch born woman who carried exotic stripping to an art form. So many myths and legends have surrounded her past that it's hard to tell reality from mystery.
Josephine Baker is best-known for her celebrated song and dance career that spanned five decades. But she is also famous for being a spy for the French resistance during World War II. As the story goes, Nazi guards were so star-struck by Baker that they let her slip across the border without trouble — little knowing that she was smuggling secrets written in invisible ink on her sheet music. After the war, Baker was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her service.
Beloved for his cool, crystalline paintings of sunlit California bungalows and poolside male nudes of the 1960s and ’70s, David Hockney is often called Britain’s greatest living artist and even the world’s most popular living painter. The cult of Hockney, who is now 79, continues with a batch of new books, including the catalog to “82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life,” mounted at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last summer, and “A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen,” a lavishly illustrated dialogue between the artist and the art critic Martin Gayford.
The 'Dance of the 41' changed the way that Mexico interpreted gender and sexuality forever. The number 13 is commonly considered unlucky, but in Mexico, the number 41 has been seen as taboo and avoided—at one point the Army left the number out of battalions, hotel and hospital rooms didn’t use it and some even skipped their 41st birthday altogether. The reason has to do with a party held in a secret location in Mexico on November 17, 1901. On that night 41—possibly 42—men gathered under the cover of night to dance together. Though some may not consider this scandalous by today’s standards, fallout from “The Dance of the 41,” as it was called by the press, was controversial enough to change the landscape of sexuality in Mexico.
