The most famous victim of the Death Cap was the Emperor Claudius. He succumbed to a dish of what he thought was Amanita caesarea, Caesar's Mushroom, a particularly scrumptious member of the otherwise highly dangerous Amanita (another first-rate joke on nature's part: the shy beauty in a family of hoodlums). But Claudius' Amanita caesarea had been spiked, almost certainly by his wife Agrippina, with an admixture of its fatal cousin - a member of his family poisoning him with a member of the family of what he thought he was eating.
John Lanchester (1996)
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