After watching a BBC report on Ethiopia's 'biblical famine,' Bob Geldof puts a band of rock stars together and records a song that sparks a global response, inspiring millions.

Ever wondered why English is so wildly inconsistent? Why dough, tough and bough look like cousins but sound like strangers? Or why you can run out, run up, run over, or even run down, and each one mea...

In 1929, long before the Galapagos Islands became synonymous with eco-tourism, conservation cruises, and Instagrammable marine iguanas, they were considered remote, harsh, and largely uninhabitable. T...

In the quiet halls of Germany’s historic university towns, a distinctive sound might once have echoed through the courtyards: the sharp clash of steel against steel, punctuated by the measured footfal...

If you ever find yourself romanticising the glitzy outlaws of the 1920s, spare a thought for Arthur Barry, a polite burglar whose life seemed lifted from a crime caper novel but was all too real. Dubb...

Long before we had celebrity voices telling us when to take the next left or warning us about average speed cameras, drivers had to rely on far humbler contraptions to find their way about. It’s easy ...

Most career criminals make headlines for their violence or brash defiance. Jeffrey Manchester, however, earned his notoriety by being unfailingly polite, oddly considerate, and for living in places mo...

It’s strange to think that a shy, awkward mathematician who loved long-distance running and chemical experiments would end up cracking Nazi codes, dreaming up the modern computer and, heartbreakingly,...

If you chat to anyone who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are they’ll remember the grim terror that was polio. It was a disease that lurked silently each summer, striking down children, paralys...

When Lord of the Flies first arrived on bookshop shelves on 17 September 1954, it did so with little fanfare and modest expectations. Yet William Golding’s unsettling tale of shipwrecked English schoolboys tearing away the thin skin of civilisation has since become a defining work of twentieth, century literature, taught, debated and adapted in countless forms. This remarkable survival story, however, extends beyond the boys on the island: the novel itself very nearly never saw the light of day.

In the early summer of 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from the intricate world of European high finance. By then, Calvi was a man living on b...

In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about thirty miles out from Atlanta — close enough for commuters, quie...

Strolling through any European art gallery that houses works from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, one cannot help but notice something oddly humorous: the baby Jesus — and indeed most other ...

On a cold January evening in 1958, an open cornfield near a quiet pond in Robeson County, North Carolina, became the unlikely stage for one of the most remarkable local acts of defiance against the Ku...

In an age long before swipes, likes and texted emojis, Victorian society found its own coded means for a glance across a ballroom to evolve into something more. Among the discreet tools in the arsenal...

When seven of America’s most powerful corporate leaders raised their right hands before Congress on 14 April 1994, the world watched to see if they would finally acknowledge what countless scientific ...

What if I told you that one of the largest human gatherings ever recorded for a concert—an estimated 1.5 million people—took place not in the open fields of Glastonbury or under the bright lights of M...

When people think of the Empire State Building, they picture a towering, steel-framed icon slicing into the Manhattan skyline. But behind its 102-storey silhouette lies a story just as awe-inspiring—o...

In the early summer of 68 CE, the last direct descendant of Julius Caesar and Augustus lay trembling in a suburban villa outside Rome, deserted by nearly everyone who once swore fealty to him. Just th...

On 6 October 1966, a date acid enthusiasts half-jokingly refer to as 'The Day of the Beast,' California became the first US state to criminalise the possession of LSD. Two years later, the prohibition...

In the quiet hours following death, long before photography could capture a likeness, artisans turned to wax and plaster to preserve the human face. The resulting object—a death mask—was not merely a ...

In 1997, amidst a storm of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and public outrage against the tobacco industry, an odd little product slipped quietly onto the market. It was called Bravo, and while it l...

When Feliks Scazighino was just six years old, the world as he knew it collapsed. Along with millions of other Polish civilians in 1940, his family was forcibly removed from their home in Kresy—then t...