Utterly interesting

Long before the age of biometric passports and full-body scanners, some travellers took a more... unconventional route to their...

If you chat to anyone who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are they’ll remember the grim terror that was polio. It was a disease...

In the great sweep of twentieth-century history, World War II produced its share of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents, figures who...

On the morning of 7 May 1915, as the RMS Lusitania  cut through the waters off the coast of Ireland, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt stood on...

Lt Col Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, SAS, in the desert near Kabrit, 1942. “Wild maybe, but he was definitely someone you would want on...

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. Slave. There’s no way around it.” — Leonard Lake It started, as so many grim tales do, with...

On a quiet suburban street in St. Louis, Missouri, a red-brick Colonial house on Roanoke Drive stands bathed in the mundane charm of...

In his 1938 novel The Unvanquished , William Faulkner portrays Colonel Sartoris as a figure emblematic of post-Civil War Southern...

In the early summer of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a place of contradictions. It was a city on the rise, oil-rich, bustling with new...

By 1970, The Doors were teetering on the edge. The past five years had been a whirlwind: hit records, sold-out tours, obscenity trials,...

These days, we don’t give colour photography a second thought. It’s everywhere. From the high-res selfies on your phone to vintage film...

In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA dreamed of a Caribbean sweep, one bullet for Trujillo, another for Castro. Only one found its...

In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces plotted the downfall of Hitler and Mussolini, a little-known episode played out in the Caribbean....

It’s one of those stories that sounds more like legend than fact, yet tucked away in the quiet, windswept monasteries of Mount Athos, it...

It’s easy to forget how recently women in many parts of the world were granted the right to vote — and just how uneven the journey to...

In the summer of 1968, as children ran barefoot through the derelict streets of Scotswood, a working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle...

It began with a calling card, scrawled with a misspelled insult, and ended in a prison cell. The most celebrated playwright in London,...

When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they...

In an age when spectacle was king and public fascination with “human curiosities” filled theatre seats from New York to New Zealand, one...

For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15...

At the dawn of the 20th century, Beach Haven had the feel of a seaside postcard come to life. Situated at the southern tip of Long Beach...

It’s hard to imagine a man so gifted at delivering joy being consumed by such a grim ending. Phil Hartman wasn’t just another comic in...

In the summer of 2017, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach — one of the most iconic luxury destinations in America — nearly welcomed a...