In May 1934, in a laboratory near Berkeley, a biologist named Robert Cornish killed five fox terriers, all of them named Lazarus, and then tried to bring them back to life on a giant mechanical see-saw. Three of them stayed dead. Two didn't. Within a few years Cornish would be lobbying the state of California for permission to try the same trick on an executed murderer, playing himself in a Hollywood film built around his own experiments, and eventually settling into a rather

The clock on Buchenwald's gatehouse has been stuck at 3:15 for more than eighty years. It's the time that marks the camp's liberation on 11 April 1945, and if you assume it's the moment American tanks rolled through the entrance, you'd be wrong. At 3:15 that afternoon there wasn't a single American soldier inside the wire. The men who took the gate were prisoners, armed with rifles and pistols they'd hidden from the SS for months. The first Americans didn't walk in until almo

On the afternoon of Sunday 10 October 1937, Sir Oswald Mosley climbed onto the roof of a loudspeaker van on a patch of waste ground in Walton, Liverpool. He straightened up, raised his arm in the fascist salute and was promptly hit on the head by a stone. He hadn't said a word. The leader of the British Union of Fascists went down on the van roof and was carried off to hospital, where he stayed for the best part of a week. It was the last time he ever tried to speak in public