Most people who've heard of Radclyffe Hall know exactly one fact about her: she wrote The Well of Loneliness, and the British government banned it for being obscene. That trial is real, and it mattered. But it was actually the second time in Hall's life that a court was asked to decide whether she was, in the words used both times, "a grossly immoral woman." The first case came eight years earlier, grew out of her secret hobby investigating psychics, and has been almost entir

Ross McWhirter spent his career counting things. He and his identical twin brother Norris built the Guinness Book of Records out of a talent for tracking down the fastest, the tallest, the heaviest and the most, and it made both of them minor celebrities, regulars on the BBC quiz show Record Breakers where kids wrote in with dares for them to settle. Then, in the autumn of 1975, Ross put a price on the heads of the IRA unit bombing London and was shot dead outside his own fro

Jenny and Rosie Dolly were identical twins from Budapest who got so famous in the 1920s that a British department store magnate spent millions trying to keep them happy, a heavyweight boxing champion refused to pick a favorite between them, and a Spanish king reportedly carried on a three year flirtation with one of them. They danced their way from a cramped New York walk-up to chateaus in France, treated the casino at Deauville like a second stage, and packed in enough wealt