The young woman who had once stood at the center of a Parisian stage, bathed in applause, now stood in a doctor’s office in Zurich, waiting to be explained. She was twenty-seven years old, and the man examining her was the most famous psychiatrist alive, Carl Gustav Jung. He had read her writings, listened to … Read more

On the 24th of April 1963, Angus Ogilvie married Princess Alexandra of Kent at Westminster Abbey before an audience estimated at 200 million people. He was a Scottish businessman, the second son of the 12th Earl of Airlie, who had built a formidable career in the City, sitting on the boards of more than fifty … Read more

By the late 1990s, Sunderland had already learned how to bury its own industries. The coal was gone, and the shipyards on the Wear had fallen silent in 1988, their cranes coming down like felled trees. A city that had spent two centuries making things with its hands was learning uneasily to answer telephones in … Read more

In the American cities of the 1850s, a third to half of all urban residents lived in boardinghouses or ran them. For roughly three dollars a week, a working person received a private room, two meals a day, laundry, and a seat at a common table with a dozen strangers who slowly became something close … Read more

On a Tuesday morning in the late 1970s, a regular customer walked up to a Wimpy restaurant in Chicago and found the door locked. There had been no closing ceremony, no farewell commercial, no press conference. A landlord had simply put up a sign. A cook had taken his apron home. A waitress had cashed … Read more

In April, when the walleye run through Mike Johnson’s trap nets off Lorain, Ohio, he lifts them, looks at thousands of dollars of fish rolling in the mesh, and tips them back over the side. The law requires it. The walleye swim north into Canadian water, where Canadian boats out of Wheatley and Port Dover … Read more

In the pale gray light of a late June morning in 1937, Rufus Callaway stood on a flat shelf of exposed rock high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and looked down at a carving that should not have been there. The stone beneath his boots was forty feet across, glacial-scarred and … Read more

At the imperial court in Bad Ischl, a young emperor was expected to choose his bride. Franz Joseph of Austria had come to the spa town with his mother, Archduchess Sophie, who had already made the selection herself: Helene in Bavaria, the eldest daughter of her sister Ludovika. The engagement was to be sealed at … Read more

Born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729, she entered a world that treated her as a commodity of negligible value. Her father was a strict Prussian military officer, her mother a bitterly ambitious woman who had wanted a son and never hid her disappointment when Sophie arrived. The child learned early that love was not … Read more