In Withnail and I, one of the most quoted scenes in British cinema has Withnail drink lighter fluid, straight from the can, out of sheer desperation for a drink. It plays as pitch-black comedy. It also really happened. The man who actually drank the lighter fluid was Vivian MacKerrell, a jobbing actor who shared a squalid flat in Camden with the young Bruce Robinson in the late 1960s, and who inadvertently became the basis for one of the most beloved characters in British fil

In the summer of 1947, a group of Swiss surgeons watched a man walk calmly across a hospital corridor with a rapier sticking clean through his torso, entry wound in his back, tip poking out through his chest, no blood, no wincing, no apparent pain at all. They X-rayed him with the blade still inside. The film showed exactly what it looked like: a sword, threaded straight through several vital organs, in a man who was very much alive and, by all accounts, mildly bored by the f

Kim Novak was groomed to be the next Marilyn Monroe, then had the audacity to be herself instead. Her story is one of the most fascinating in classic Hollywood.

Steve McQueen spent most of his career being the coolest man on any screen. He was the guy doing his own stunts in Bullitt, jumping the fence in The Great Escape (or at least getting the credit for it), and turning up to a three-week LIFE magazine shoot looking like he'd been born in sunglasses. Less than two decades after that shoot, he was checking into a small Mexican hospital under a fake name, weighing a fraction of his usual weight, and hoping a dentist with a revoked l

Diego Maradona is remembered as one of the greatest footballers who ever lived, a man who could win a World Cup practically on his own and turn a stadium of 80,000 people into believers with one run at goal. But strip away the highlight reels and you're left with one of the messiest, most scandal-soaked private lives in sporting history. Cocaine addiction that nearly killed him more than once. A years-long entanglement with one of Naples' most violent mafia clans. Eight ackno

In June 1908, a young Austrian woman named Sadie Schoen was hauled into a New York City police station and photographed twice, once facing the camera, once in profile. The charge on her card read simply: swindling. Her case is one of the ones that gave a later exhibition of these photographs its title, "Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle," a phrase that says as much about how the era's press covered women's crime as it does about Schoen herself. Beyond that card, history

In the summer of 1951, a bus driver named Harvey Clark tried to move his wife and two kids into a rented apartment in Cicero, Illinois. He never spent a single night there. Instead, for the better part of a week, thousands of his new neighbours turned up outside the building to riot, and it took the National Guard, tear gas and fixed bayonets to bring the town back under control. It remains one of the largest and most well documented race riots in American history, and it hap

Poland's Second World War produced more than its fair share of stories that sound made up. There's a bear who hauled artillery shells at Monte Cassino, and then there's Krystyna Skarbek, a countess from Warsaw who skied across a mountain range with intelligence hidden in her glove linings, talked a Gestapo officer into freeing three condemned prisoners, and remains, decades on, the longest-serving female agent Britain's wartime secret service ever fielded. She went by several

Black-and-white group posing with a Tamla-Motown UK Tour banner listing The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas.

If you've ever sat through a forensics class, you've probably heard the story. Two prisoners, same name, same face, same measurements, at the same federal penitentiary in Kansas in 1903. Only their fingerprints told them apart, and that one mix-up supposedly killed off the Bertillon system and ushered in the age of fingerprinting. It's a great story. It's told in textbooks, FBI materials, and true crime blogs to this day. The trouble is, when you actually dig into the documen

In 1979, apprentice embalmer Karen Greenlee stole a hearse, the body inside it, and confessed to years of necrophilia in a letter meant to be her suicide note.

Rudolf Koppitz survived being shot down over enemy territory in 1917, won a bravery medal, and went on to photograph Bewegungsstudie, the most widely published image in Austrian photography. Here's his story.

On 4 July 1857, the Dead Rabbits raided a Bowery Boys clubhouse and kicked off two days of gang warfare in Lower Manhattan. Around 1,000 fighters. Eight confirmed dead. The police ran away.

Kim Philby was Britain's most damaging double agent, passing secrets to Moscow for nearly thirty years. Here's how he was finally caught, who he worked with, and what happened after he fled to Russia

Bunny Yeager shot hundreds of women whose names barely survived their photographs. The story of Dinnie Sutton, Maria Stinger, Lisa Winters, and the women history left behind.

The Bowery Boys were a nativist New York street gang who spent the 1840s and 1850s fighting Irish immigrants in the streets of Lower Manhattan. Their most infamous member was Bill the Butcher. Their politics shaped American history.

Bunny Yeager was a model-turned-photographer who made Bettie Page famous, broke into a male-dominated industry, and redefined what pin-up photography could be.

Sir Roger Casement exposed colonial atrocities in the Congo and Peru, fought for Irish independence, and was executed for treason in 1916. His sexuality became a weapon against him.

Peter Wyngarde was one of Britain's biggest TV stars until a Gloucester bus station ended it all. The full story of Jason King, the internment camp, the album, and the lies

In 1940, Eleanor Jarman escaped a 199-year prison sentence and vanished. In 2025, researchers think they found her grave in Denver, and her own family went to visit it.

The star went AWOL, the producer had never heard of Queen, and nobody agreed on what film they were making. The behind-the-scenes story of Flash Gordon (1980) is as wild as the movie.

Johnny Cash didn't just sing about the downtrodden. He showed up for them. From Native American rights to prison reform and disability advocacy, here's the full story of his activism.

How did Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951)? Discover the rotating room, strapped cameraman, and brilliant engineering behind one of Hollywood's greatest illusions.