In January 1943, Warner Bros. released a seven-minute cartoon built around a swing band, a jitterbugging prince and an almost entirely Black voice cast, and it still divides the very people who study cartoons for a living. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs gets ranked among the best animated shorts ever made by the animators who worked in that era. It's also been formally banned from American television since 1968. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out. Quick

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

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