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