In October 1912, a young woman from a small village in southwest Serbia cut her hair, put on her brother's conscription papers and walked into the First Balkan War under his name. By the time she finally stopped fighting, more than a decade and two wars later, Milunka Savić had been wounded close to a dozen times, had personally marched dozens of enemy soldiers into captivity with nothing but a rifle and her own nerve, and had been decorated more times than almost any soldier

The story everyone tells about Keith Moon's death is that the wildest drummer in rock finally partied himself into the ground. It's a tidy ending for a man who drove cars into swimming pools and blew up drum kits on live television. It's also not really what happened. On the night he died, Moon was closer to sober than he'd been in years, he'd just turned down a plate of birthday cake for a man who'd been dead for two decades, and the drug that killed him wasn't there to fuel

Truman Capote once joked that if Denham Fouts had accepted Adolf Hitler's advances, the Second World War might never have happened. It's the kind of outrageous claim that sums up Fouts perfectly: a man who left behind almost nothing of his own making, and yet somehow ended up at the centre of some of the twentieth century's most extraordinary company. He never published a novel, painted a canvas or held a job for more than a few months. Instead, he became a muse to Capote, Ch