Somewhere in a lot of British lofts and charity shops, there's a battered hardback called Jane Asher's Fancy Dress. Flip past the introduction and you'll find grown adults, several of them recognisable working actors, standing in front of a plain studio backdrop dressed as a rock salmon, a jailbird and a pixie on a toadstool. It's not a spoof. It's a genuine 1983 how to guide, and it's one of the strangest artefacts British publishing produced that decade. The book was publis

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I am the Lobster Boy." That was Grady Stiles Jr's opening line, delivered thousands of times over a career that spanned decades of American carnival midways. Audiences came to gawk at his hands and feet, fused by a rare genetic condition into claw-like shapes. What they didn't see, until it became impossible to ignore, was that Stiles was also a violent, controlling alcoholic who shot a man dead the night before his daughter's wedding, wal

James Bond gets an exploding pen and a car with an ejector seat. Real Cold War spies got something considerably less glamorous, and often considerably more uncomfortable. The CIA and KGB genuinely spent decades and millions of dollars designing tools meant to help agents hide, escape, kill or eavesdrop without getting caught, and some of what they came up with sounds more like a dare than actual tradecraft. Here's a look at some of the strangest gadgets that real intelligence