Yuri with Asya When the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov finally visited Mexico in the early 1990s, he was received with the reverence...

Explore the notorious life of Tiberius Caesar, Rome’s second emperor, whose reclusive reign on Capri gave rise to enduring tales of sexual depravity, political paranoia and scandalous excess. Uncover the truth behind the myths with this deep dive into one of Rome’s most controversial rulers.

On 14 November 1959, the quiet Kansas town of Holcomb was shattered when Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenage children were brutally murdered in their farmhouse. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, ex-convicts chasing a rumour of hidden cash, left no witnesses. Truman Capote later immortalised the case in In Cold Blood, but his narrative blurred fact and fiction — leaving behind a legacy of controversy as well as tragedy.

When the world slid towards chaos in the late 1930s, there were individuals who, faced with impossible choices, quietly chose to do the...

It was a Thursday evening in November 1975, and anyone who wandered into the Common Room at Saint Martins School of Art on London's Charing Cross Road that night had no real reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. They'd paid about 50 pence to see a pub rock band called Bazooka Joe. What they got instead was the opening salvo of the British punk revolution, delivered by four scruffy young men who'd shown up without any equipment, borrowed everything they needed, and th

Imagine this: it’s a crisp Sunday morning in late 1973, and the usually bustling streets of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague are eerily quiet. No cars, no traffic jams, just the sound of bicycles whizzing by, children playing in the streets, and the occasional bell from a passing tram. For three months in the autumn and early winter of that year, this peaceful scene became a weekly reality as the Dutch government implemented a ban on cars on Sundays. The reason? The ongoin

Black Bart robbed Wells Fargo stagecoaches on foot, left poems at the scene and lived as a dapper gent in San Francisco until a laundry mark gave him away.

Mary Surratt ran the boarding house where John Wilkes Booth planned Lincoln's assassination. She was tried by a military tribunal, denied a habeas corpus appeal, and hanged in 1865 despite a clemency petition from five of her own judges.

Frank Sinatra died on 14 May 1998 while America watched the Seinfeld finale. His last words, the family feud, what was buried with him and what happened to his grave.

Mata Hari was born on August 7, 1876 as Margaretha “Gretha” Geertruida Zelle in the Netherlands. Since her conviction as a double agent during WWI she has become a byword for the femme fatale. Productions like the 1931 film “Mata Hari” starring Greta Garbo, perpetuated the story of the glamorous courtesan and exotic dancer with a dangerous double life as a spy who was suddenly found out by the French, and executed in 1917. However the last few years has seen a revision of the

Six and a half months before Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland, an unsettling event took place in New York City’s Madison Square Garden...

Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa hiccuped non-stop for 68 years after a farm accident in 1922. His story remains the longest recorded hiccup attack in history, verified by Guinness World Records.

Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin’s eldest son, lived a life overshadowed by his father’s power. Captured during World War II, his death in a Nazi camp remains shrouded in controversy and tragedy.

Anita Berber shocked Weimar Berlin with nude dances drugs and radical self expression. Beneath the scandal was a pioneering performance artist whose life mirrored the freedoms and dangers of the 1920s.

The Forty Elephants stole from Selfridges with secret pockets, used diamond rings as knuckledusters, and were led for a decade by a woman called Diamond Annie. They lasted from the 1870s to the 1950s.

In 1915, Cecil Chubb went shopping for dining chairs and came home with Stonehenge. Discover how his impulse buy became a national treasure.

In August 1990, Playgirl Magazine advertised the chance to “Sleep with Donald Trump” on its cover to its predominantly female audience. The move followed Trump’s messy and public divorce with his first wife, Ivana, who alleged that the entrepreneur had sexually assaulted her and pulled out her hair. Ivana Trump reportedly walked out of the marriage with a settlement of between US$14 million and US$25 million. As his divorce pended, the magazine quickly ran a contest with the

Some people juggle, some perform card tricks, and then there was Alfred Langevin—who could smoke a pipe through his eyes. A Man of Unique Talents Langevin was a resident of Detroit, Michigan, in the 1930s, a time when the world was reeling from the Great Depression and desperate for a bit of amusement. Enter Mr. Langevin, whose particular skill set was equal parts astounding and slightly unsettling. Not only could he inhale tobacco smoke through his mouth and exhale it throug

Sigmund Freud’s early career coincided with his enthusiastic promotion of cocaine as a medical wonder drug. This is how the substance shaped the origins of psychoanalysis in late nineteenth century Vienna.

Ernest Hemingway survived plane crashes, a war, and two rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. His final months were shaped by the FBI watching him, manuscripts stranded in Cuba, and a mind he felt had been destroyed by the treatment meant to save it.

On a cold Saturday evening in December 1961, four young musicians from Liverpool walked into a ballroom in a Hampshire garrison town and set up their amplifiers with quiet confidence. They had driven nearly nine hours to get there. They believed London was within reach. They expected that industry figures might attend. Instead, they played to roughly eighteen people. The date was the 9th December, 1961. The venue was the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot. The band was the Beatles

In Irish mythology, Cuchulainn was a formidable leader and the main character in the "Ulster Cycle" of poems, which can be considered the Irish counterpart to England's Arthurian legends. One poem in this cycle is "Serglige Con Culaind & Oenét Emire," translated as "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn" or "The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind." In the story, Cuchulainn is taken ill when he is attacked in a dream by two women with horsewhips (he lay asleep in his sickbed for a year as

On 6 July 1957, a 16-year-old John Lennon played a church fete in Woolton and was introduced to a 15-year-old Paul McCartney in a Scout hut. The man who brought them together was Ivan Vaughan, who was born on the exact same day as McCartney.