In July 1930, a Broadway dancer named Faith Bacon was arrested for performing nude on a New York stage, fans in hand, nothing else. Three years later, another dancer doing essentially the same act with the same fans was the single biggest attraction at the Chicago World's Fair, pulling crowds that reportedly saved the whole event from a financial flop. That second dancer was Sally Rand. The first was Faith Bacon, and she's the one who actually invented the fan dance. History

In October 1982, a 23-year-old architecture student left London with a battered BMW motorcycle, a tent, and £2,500 to her name. Two years, four continents and around 35,000 miles later, Elspeth Beard rode back into the city having crashed twice, contracted hepatitis and dysentery, forged her own travel permits, and become the first British woman known to circle the globe alone on a motorcycle in one continuous trip. Then she put the whole story in a cardboard box and didn't t

In the summer of 1971, three men sat in London's Old Bailey facing years behind bars over a magazine that teenagers had put together. The Oz obscenity trial ran for six weeks, the longest obscenity case in British legal history, and it turned a scruffy underground publication into the centre of a genuine culture war. By the time it was over, the case had pulled in John Lennon, a Rumpole of the Bailey creator, forced prison haircuts, and a Lord Chief Justice personally sending