Utterly interesting

Most people know Victor Hugo as the towering literary figure behind Les Misérables  and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , a man whose pen...

It was just before dawn on 12 April 1980, when a group of barely-known army sergeants slipped into Liberia’s Executive Mansion and...

“Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham…” – Letter to the Birmingham Daily...

When people talk about Elvis Presley’s finest moment, they usually land on the obvious: that first explosive single in 1954, “That’s All...

On a misty morning off the coast of Nagasaki, a concrete island rises suddenly from the sea like a warship adrift in time. Locals call it...

“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.” — Omaha’s Mayor, just before a lynch mob strung him up. That was Sunday, 28 September...

Ever wondered why English is so wildly inconsistent? Why dough , tough  and bough  look like cousins but sound like strangers? Or why you...

It started with a raid. The kind of thing that had happened a hundred times before. But something snapped that night. Maybe it was the...

In 1929, long before the Galapagos Islands became synonymous with eco-tourism, conservation cruises, and Instagrammable marine iguanas,...

If you ever find yourself romanticising the glitzy outlaws of the 1920s, spare a thought for Arthur Barry, a polite burglar whose life...

Long before we had celebrity voices telling us when to take the next left or warning us about average speed cameras, drivers had to rely...

‘He was young and handsome…his mother’s hope.’ He was young and handsome, his mother’s pride and joy, but he died in torment, blind, sick...

On 21 June 1675, a foundation stone was quietly laid in the heart of London, an unassuming act that would, over centuries, come to...

Imagine sitting in a dingy consulting room sometime around 1900. You’ve come to see a doctor because your skin has erupted in angry...

Let us drift back, if you will, to the languid, sun-bleached summers of 1936 and 1937, a moment suspended on the cusp of catastrophe, to...

In the autumn of 1998, a tragic act of violence in suburban New York captured the growing tension at the heart of America’s abortion...

It’s often said that Chicago built its empire on the backs of immigrants and the muscle of men willing to do what others wouldn’t dare....

When Lord of the Flies  first arrived on bookshop shelves on 17 September 1954, it did so with little fanfare and modest expectations....

In the early summer of 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from the intricate world...

In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about...

When we flick through war photography now, we half expect raw, sometimes shocking snapshots of the front lines, muddy trenches,...

Strolling through any European art gallery that houses works from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, one cannot help but notice...

On a cold January evening in 1958, an open cornfield near a quiet pond in Robeson County, North Carolina, became the unlikely stage for...

In an age long before swipes, likes and texted emojis, Victorian society found its own coded means for a glance across a ballroom to...