Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, two of the biggest tearjerkers in French literature. But his own life could have filled a few scandalous novels of its own, and honestly, it almost makes his fiction look tame by comparison. Between affairs, arrests, a secret diary written in a code his own family couldn't crack, and a funeral that reportedly shut down every brothel in Paris for the day, Hugo lived like a man determined to out drama his own boo

James Bond gets an exploding pen and a car with an ejector seat. Real Cold War spies got something considerably less glamorous, and often considerably more uncomfortable. The CIA and KGB genuinely spent decades and millions of dollars designing tools meant to help agents hide, escape, kill or eavesdrop without getting caught, and some of what they came up with sounds more like a dare than actual tradecraft. Here's a look at some of the strangest gadgets that real intelligence

In the summer of 1971, three men sat in London's Old Bailey facing years behind bars over a magazine that teenagers had put together. The Oz obscenity trial ran for six weeks, the longest obscenity case in British legal history, and it turned a scruffy underground publication into the centre of a genuine culture war. By the time it was over, the case had pulled in John Lennon, a Rumpole of the Bailey creator, forced prison haircuts, and a Lord Chief Justice personally sending