On a warm November afternoon in 1988, in a rented house on the flat green edge of Buenos Aires, a friend found the richest woman in the world lying dead in her bath. She was 37 years old. In the rooms around her sat more than 40 different bottles of pills. She owned a private … Read more

On September 13, 1946, a courtroom in Kraków handed down a death sentence. The condemned man was Amon Göth, the commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp in occupied Poland, convicted of mass murder by a Polish tribunal. Less than a year later he was hanged on the site of the camp he had once ruled, … Read more

In April of 1999, three sisters walked into the Los Angeles County Superior Court, not in person but on paper, asking a judge for something that would change their names forever. Nicolette was fourteen, Kendall was ten, and Alexandra was eight. They were represented by Stephen Bergon of Latham and Watkins, one of the most … Read more

By the time the third divorce was final, Olive Paget had learned the lesson well enough that she no longer needed anyone to teach it to her. Three marriages, three divorces, and after each one the castle remained where it had always been, in her name. Leeds Castle in Kent, a medieval fortress surrounded by … Read more

On the evening of the 18th of October 1968, Maria Callas walked into the anniversary party at Maxim’s in Paris wearing a bright printed gown and diamonds, and she smiled for every photographer in the room. Two days later, on the Greek island of Scorpios, the man she had given nine years of her life … Read more

In October 1884, in the dusty town of Frisco, New Mexico Territory, a nineteen-year-old Mexican-American kid carrying a mail-order deputy sheriff’s badge walked into a confrontation that should have ended his life. Elfego Baca was not a real lawman. No one had appointed him. No one had asked him to keep the peace. He had … Read more

In the spring of 1882, a block of marble weighing six tons left the ground at the base of the Washington Monument and began to climb. It rose on a single steam hoist up the inside of a hollow stone shaft toward an iron frame bolted four hundred feet in the air. Once the stone … Read more

At Pembroke Castle in January 1457, a thirteen-year-old girl gave birth to a son. The labor was catastrophic. Her body, still a child’s, was not built to deliver a full-term infant, and the birth left Margaret Beaufort permanently injured, unable to ever conceive again. The men who had arranged the marriage cared little. They had … Read more

In February 1943, at a collection point behind German lines in central Tunisia, the Wehrmacht was taking stock of the wreckage it had made of the American army at Kasserine. Half-tracks, trucks, artillery, and abandoned tanks littered the ground. Among the captured equipment, a German ordnance officer picked up an object that appeared on no … Read more