Truman Capote once joked that if Denham Fouts had accepted Adolf Hitler's advances, the Second World War might never have happened. It's the kind of outrageous claim that sums up Fouts perfectly: a man who left behind almost nothing of his own making, and yet somehow ended up at the centre of some of the twentieth century's most extraordinary company. He never published a novel, painted a canvas or held a job for more than a few months. Instead, he became a muse to Capote, Ch

On the morning of 8 May 1902, a Caribbean city of roughly 28,000 people was wiped off the map in under three minutes. The eruption of Mount Pelée remains the deadliest volcanic disaster of the twentieth century, and by most tallies only two or three people inside the city survived it directly. One of them owed his life entirely to a drunken brawl. A local troublemaker named Ludger Sylbaris had been thrown into a windowless stone cell the night before, as punishment for a figh

Kurt Daluege isn't as widely remembered as Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann, but he built the machinery a lot of their worst crimes ran on. As chief of Nazi Germany's Order Police for seven years, he turned a uniformed constabulary into an instrument of occupation, deportation and mass shooting. Then, in the summer of 1942, acting in Reinhard Heydrich's place, he gave the order that erased an entire Czech village from the map and sent its surviving children to a gas van. This is