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What Is the Mabinogion? Inside Wales's Oldest Myths, Manuscripts and Heroes
The Mabinogion is Wales's great collection of medieval prose tales, eleven stories of shapeshifting kings, cursed queens, talking heads and giants with impossible demands, and it's one of the strangest survival stories in British literature. The stories themselves are older than Britain's oldest surviving copies of them by centuries, the modern title everyone uses for the collection was basically a mistake, and buried inside one of its tales is the same fighting dragon that e
Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Believed Hitler Was a Hindu God
Most people who built their whole worldview around Adolf Hitler at least had the excuse of being German. Savitri Devi didn't have that excuse. She was born in France to a Greek father and a British mother, converted to Hinduism in her twenties, married an Indian nationalist and spent the rest of her life insisting that Hitler had been an avatar of the god Vishnu, sent to earth to fight off a cosmic dark age. She also wrote one of the more widely read animal rights books of th
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe: The Whitby Photos That Got Him Excommunicated
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe spent close to fifty years quietly photographing a small Yorkshire fishing town, and in the process built one of the most complete visual records of Victorian working life anywhere in Britain. He also managed, with a single photograph of children playing in a harbour, to get himself excommunicated by his own church. A few years later, a wrecked Russian ship he photographed near Whitby's harbour would go on to shape one of the most famous horror novels e
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