In the pre-dawn dark of 1961, a line of concrete trucks stretched down the Seattle streets, headlights burning, one after another after another. Four hundred and sixty-seven of them, hauling close to six thousand tons of wet concrete toward a single hole in the ground. The pour could not stop—not for a shift change, not … Read more

For a generation of children in the 1990s, one television hero stood above all the rest. He arrived as a villain, a brooding new student with a dark secret who played a haunting tune on a flute-like dagger. He was the Green Ranger, and he was cool in a way the show’s clean-cut heroes were … Read more

The young pilot’s hands shook as he pulled the throttle forward, the Zero’s engine screaming beneath him as the carrier deck rushed past. He was nineteen, maybe twenty, with barely enough hours in his logbook to justify the wings on his chest. He had never fired his guns in anger. He had never even seen … Read more

In the blazing Caribbean afternoon of August 2010, Lady Anne Conor sat in a lawyer’s office in Saint Lucia, ready for the final chapter of a marriage that had been a psychological war lasting fifty-four years. She was the daughter of an earl, the devoted lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, and the woman who had quietly … Read more

The phone rang early in the morning, the way bad news usually does. On the other end was a psychiatrist she had never met in person, calling her at home, not for the first time. He wanted her to say four words. He wanted her to admit that she had never really been sick at … Read more

On January 30, 1985, Farrah Fawcett gave birth to her only child, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal. By then, she had already conquered the entertainment world. Her years on Charlie’s Angels in the mid-1970s had made her a household name. Her red swimsuit poster, first shot as a simple promotional photo, had sold more than twelve … Read more

The realization that she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke itself. Those were the words Bette Davis chose, at seventy-nine, sitting across from a television interviewer in 1987, two years before she died. She had survived a hysterectomy, then a series of strokes that left part of her face … Read more

The king’s hand was too weak now to hold a pen. So Anthony Denny held the tool for him—a small metal stamp carved with the royal signature—and pressed it into the waiting papers. In the shuttered bedchamber that stank of medicine and unhealed flesh, Henry VIII lay propped among pillows, his ulcerated legs hidden beneath … Read more

The mausoleum stood just beyond the great house, a granite block sunk into the forest floor of the Schorfheide, its carved stone eagles and bronze torchbearers still catching the last of the evening light. Inside, in a stone sarcophagus, lay the lead-lined coffin of Karin Göring, the woman whose name Hermann Göring had given to … Read more