The telegram had already been sent, and the letters of condolence were arriving at Althorp House when those closest to Lady Cynthia Spencer began to understand the full scale of what they had lost. The Queen Mother, who had leaned on Cynthia for thirty-five years, did not replace her Lady of the Bed Chamber. There … Read more

On the night of November 20, 1995, nearly twenty-three million people in Britain sat down to watch a princess tell the truth about her marriage. Diana, Princess of Wales, had agreed to an interview with the BBC program Panorama, recorded in secret in her own sitting room at Kensington Palace eleven days earlier. For fourteen … Read more

In the winter of 1697, a stonemason named Gerolamo Vanzetti climbed down a set of stairs beneath the Vatican that, according to every official floor plan of the Holy See ever published, do not exist. He carried a lamp, a measuring cord, and a commission from the office of the papal architect to survey a … Read more

On the morning of the 27th of May, 1541, a frail woman of sixty-seven was led to a low wooden block inside the grounds of the Tower of London. She was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and she had been held in that fortress for two and a half years without ever being brought to … Read more

On the second of September 2014, a two-year-old building went dark on the Atlantic City boardwalk. It had cost $2. 4 billion to build, and the state of New Jersey had put $261 million in tax credits behind it because the men who approved that money believed the tower would save the city. It opened … Read more

The man who had ruled Romania for nearly a quarter of a century raised his hand to greet the crowd, and the sound that came back was almost deafening. On the balcony of the Central Committee building in Bucharest, Nicolae Ceaușescu smiled into the freezing wind that swept Palace Square. Below him, more than fifty … Read more

In July 1960, in a siding at Derby scrap men cut up a black locomotive whose number had been 10100. When the torches went out, nothing remained of the most mechanically complex locomotive ever built in Britain but a tabletop model in a museum. The machine had beaten steam over the Pennines, cleaned the tunnels … Read more

By December 1862, Lieutenant Samuel Whitaker had seen enough of war to believe nothing could surprise him. He had led patrols through country where both armies and the bushwhackers who preyed on them had left their marks, and he had learned to read a landscape the way other men read a ledger. So when a … Read more

The Short Sunderland flying boat lifted off from the waters off Invergordon at 1:10 p. m. on the 25th of August, 1942, carrying fifteen men northwest along the Scottish coastline before it would turn across the open sea toward Iceland. Among them was Prince George, Duke of Kent, the youngest brother of King George VI, … Read more