In October 1982, a 23-year-old architecture student left London with a battered BMW motorcycle, a tent, and £2,500 to her name. Two years, four continents and around 35,000 miles later, Elspeth Beard rode back into the city having crashed twice, contracted hepatitis and dysentery, forged her own travel permits, and become the first British woman known to circle the globe alone on a motorcycle in one continuous trip. Then she put the whole story in a cardboard box and didn't t

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I am the Lobster Boy." That was Grady Stiles Jr's opening line, delivered thousands of times over a career that spanned decades of American carnival midways. Audiences came to gawk at his hands and feet, fused by a rare genetic condition into claw-like shapes. What they didn't see, until it became impossible to ignore, was that Stiles was also a violent, controlling alcoholic who shot a man dead the night before his daughter's wedding, wal

Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into the USS Indianapolis and sank her in twelve minutes. Almost 900 men went into the Pacific Ocean. Nobody came looking for them for nearly four days. By the time rescue planes finally spotted the survivors, sharks, dehydration and salt poisoning had cut their numbers from around 900 down to 316. It remains the single worst loss of life from one ship in the history of the US Navy, and it happened f