Werner Herzog has spent six decades making films about people who chase impossible goals in places that don't want them there: a man dragging a steamship over a mountain, conquistadors floating to their deaths on a raft in the Amazon, scientists holed up at the bottom of the world. Long before any of that, he was living the same story himself. Between finishing school and shooting his first real film, Herzog followed a girlfriend to a slum in Manchester, tried to walk into th

For 57 years, a woman audiences knew as Mabel Stark walked into steel cages packed with tigers, wrestled her favourite among them to the ground in front of paying crowds, and survived at least 18 separate maulings along the way. She's usually remembered as the first woman to make a career out of training tigers, in an era when most circuses wouldn't let a woman near the cats at all. Her real name wasn't even Mabel Stark. A Rough Start in Kentucky She was born Mary Ann Haynie

On August 24, 1847, a parcel went out from Keighley railway station in Yorkshire, bound for a publisher's office in London. Inside was a handwritten manuscript running to hundreds of pages, sent by a writer using a name that wasn't really hers, from a family address that wasn't disclosed, on the back of a novel that had already been rejected more times than anyone was keeping count of. Six weeks later it was a bestseller. The writer was Charlotte Brontë, the book was Jane Eyr

A Kansas farm girl from a strict Catholic family ran off to join a traveling carnival in 1916, taught herself to ride a motorcycle sideways around a vertical wooden wall at full throttle, and spent the next couple of decades billed as the world's foremost woman motorcycle stunt rider. That part of Lillian La France's story shows up on plenty of vintage photo blogs. What most of them leave out is what happened to her memory decades later, when an experimental filmmaker tracked

For 25 years, Herb Ritts built his entire career on physical perfection. He photographed the most idealized bodies in the world, supermodels glistening in black and white, Madonna at her most sculpted, an unknown actor named Richard Gere looking like a god at a gas station, and sold that vision of flawless health to magazines, movie studios and advertising agencies across the planet. The whole time, for well over a decade of it, he was quietly living with HIV, a fact he hid f

Before it had emperors, movie stars and one of Weimar Berlin's most scandalous dancers in front of its lens, the Atelier d'Ora was just one woman's stubborn bet on herself. Dora Kallmus opened it in Vienna in 1907, at a time when formal photography training simply wasn't available to women, and built it into the most fashionable portrait studio in the city with the help of a technician named Arthur Benda who eventually got his own name on the door. For twenty years the studio

Most people who've heard of Radclyffe Hall know exactly one fact about her: she wrote The Well of Loneliness, and the British government banned it for being obscene. That trial is real, and it mattered. But it was actually the second time in Hall's life that a court was asked to decide whether she was, in the words used both times, "a grossly immoral woman." The first case came eight years earlier, grew out of her secret hobby investigating psychics, and has been almost entir

Ross McWhirter spent his career counting things. He and his identical twin brother Norris built the Guinness Book of Records out of a talent for tracking down the fastest, the tallest, the heaviest and the most, and it made both of them minor celebrities, regulars on the BBC quiz show Record Breakers where kids wrote in with dares for them to settle. Then, in the autumn of 1975, Ross put a price on the heads of the IRA unit bombing London and was shot dead outside his own fro

Jenny and Rosie Dolly were identical twins from Budapest who got so famous in the 1920s that a British department store magnate spent millions trying to keep them happy, a heavyweight boxing champion refused to pick a favorite between them, and a Spanish king reportedly carried on a three year flirtation with one of them. They danced their way from a cramped New York walk-up to chateaus in France, treated the casino at Deauville like a second stage, and packed in enough wealt

Adolf Hitler once sent Margery Booth 200 red roses wrapped in a sash printed with a swastika. He'd just watched her sing at Bayreuth and told her she was perfectly charming. What he didn't know was that the same woman was smuggling British intelligence out of Nazi Germany hidden in her underwear, hiding a Jewish woman in her Berlin flat, and burying stolen documents in the grounds of a royal palace. She got away with it for years, moving through Hitler's inner circle as one o

Tempest Storm spent almost 60 years on stage, but her offstage life reads like a highlight reel of mid-century America's most dangerous men. She danced her way from a Georgia cotton farm to the top of the Vegas Strip, and along the way she wound up in the arms of a president-to-be, the King of Rock and Roll, and one of Los Angeles' most feared gangsters. She outlived pretty much all of them, and she never stopped talking about it. A Hard Start in Dodge County, Georgia She was

Jackie Coogan made Hollywood's first child star fortune and never got to spend a dime of it himself. Between 1923 and 1936 alone he earned just over three million dollars, with a few million more in property and contracts on top of that, and he'd been told the whole pile would be his once he turned 21. By the time he actually asked for it, his mother told him flatly that none of it had ever been his to begin with. What happened in between, the mansion, the furs, the diamond s

On the night of August 8, 1969, five people were murdered at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, and the story that came out of it, Charles Manson, a race war he called Helter Skelter, a group of young followers acting on his orders, has been repeated so many times it feels like a closed case. Books got written, a prosecutor became famous, everyone involved either died in prison or spent decades fighting parole boards. But pull on two threads still hanging off that story and it

In 1957, barely into his twenties, Lucien Clergue published his first photography book, and it came with a cover designed by Pablo Picasso, an introduction written by Jean Cocteau and poems selected from the surrealist Paul Éluard. Most photographers spend a lifetime chasing that kind of company. Clergue got it before he'd had a single major exhibition, and it wasn't luck. It was the payoff of a childhood spent surviving war, poverty and grief, and turning all of it into a ca

In 1954, the New York Times gave Peter Gowland a title that followed him for the rest of his life: America's No. 1 Pin-Up Photographer. It wasn't just a flashy headline. Gowland spent more than six decades photographing some of the most famous women in the country, sold over a thousand magazine covers, and got so annoyed with the cameras available to buy that he just started building his own instead. By the time he died in 2010, he'd designed more than twenty different camera

Almost everyone alive in 1993 remembers some version of what happened in that Manassas, Virginia apartment: Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband John's penis with a kitchen knife while he slept, drove off with it still in her hand, and became a late night punchline for the next decade. What almost nobody remembers, because it was never as funny or as tidy a headline, is what each of them actually did with the following thirty years. One built a nonprofit. The other built an arr

Bruce Reynolds called it his Sistine Chapel. Ronnie Biggs got a folk hero's send off. Buster Edwards got a film named after him and a flower stall by Waterloo station. Sixty years on, the Great Train Robbery still gets talked about like a caper, a bit of cheeky British villainy pulled off by a gang of lovable rogues who outsmarted the establishment. There's just one problem with that story. It leaves out the man they nearly killed. A very ordinary night shift On the night of

Tura Satana is best remembered as Varla, the merciless leader of a girl gang who kills a man with her bare hands in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It's one of the most iconic performances in exploitation film history. It's also, by a wide margin, the tamest thing about her actual life. Long before she ever stood in front of Meyer's camera, Satana had survived an internment camp, run with a street gang, danced burlesque under a false name to hide

For five summers running, a working farm turned nudist resort outside a small town in southern Ontario pulled off something genuinely strange. Every July, thousands of people, clothed spectators included, drove out to watch a naked beauty pageant that got more press coverage in its first year than a visit from the sitting Prime Minister. It was called Miss Nude World, and between 1970 and 1975 it turned Freelton, Ontario, a place most Canadians had never heard of, into an unl

Somewhere in a lot of British lofts and charity shops, there's a battered hardback called Jane Asher's Fancy Dress. Flip past the introduction and you'll find grown adults, several of them recognisable working actors, standing in front of a plain studio backdrop dressed as a rock salmon, a jailbird and a pixie on a toadstool. It's not a spoof. It's a genuine 1983 how to guide, and it's one of the strangest artefacts British publishing produced that decade. The book was publis

On the morning of August 7, 1890, a 48 year old woman named Anna Månsdotter was led into the courtyard of Kristianstad district jail in southern Sweden and beheaded with an axe. It wasn't the crime itself that made her famous, plenty of people had killed before her. It was everything that came out during the trial. Swedish papers dubbed her Yngsjömörderskan, the Yngsjö Murderess, and the name stuck. Anna Månsdotter remains the last woman ever executed in Sweden, and the case

Paul Tibbets became the face of the Enola Gay and always said he slept fine. His co-pilot Robert Lewis, bumped from command days before the mission, spent the rest of his life differently.

If you'd wandered onto the gaming floor of the Las Vegas Hilton at almost any hour during the early 1970s, there's a good chance you'd have spotted a six-foot, grossly overweight man parked at the roulette table. Elephant-head cane resting beside him, cigar clamped in his mouth, cheap baseball cap sitting awkwardly on a bald head, he'd be losing enormous sums of money with a kind of grim determination. He called the casino floor his “other office,” and he meant it, spending 1