If you'd wandered onto the gaming floor of the Las Vegas Hilton at almost any hour during the early 1970s, there's a good chance you'd have spotted a six-foot, grossly overweight man parked at the roulette table. Elephant-head cane resting beside him, cigar clamped in his mouth, cheap baseball cap sitting awkwardly on a bald head, he'd be losing enormous sums of money with a kind of grim determination. He called the casino floor his “other office,” and he meant it, spending 1

In November 1942, in a Berlin coffee shop, a Jewish woman living under a fake name sat down with a woman married to a soldier serving Hitler's army, a woman who reportedly liked to boast that she could smell a Jew. Two years later, the Gestapo had one of them, and the other was writing letters to a concentration camp that would never be answered. In between, the two women fell in love, wrote each other a private marriage contract, and exchanged rings, all while one of them wa

In the summer of 1961, a 19 year old model climbed out of a swimming pool at a Buckinghamshire country estate, and a British government started dying without anyone in the room realising it yet. By the time the fallout finished two years later, a cabinet minister had lied to Parliament and resigned in disgrace, an osteopath had killed himself rather than face a guilty verdict, a prime minister had quit citing his health, and an entire government had lost the next election. Th