History

Ransom Vane stood at the head of the upper field and watched the light drain out of the hollow as if it were being poured from a tipped bowl. The sun was still a hand above the western ridge, but down where he stood the grayness was already closing in, coming up to a line … Read more

In the spring of 1957, Vito Genovese, the most powerful mob boss in New York, summoned Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson to a meeting and stripped him of his independence in public. He gave Johnson two choices: submit, or disappear. Johnson nodded once, walked out, and did not say a single word. Ten weeks later, it was … Read more

In August 1995, the News of the World had gathered enough corroboration, enough eyewitness accounts of Will Carling’s Range Rover passing through the police barriers at Kensington Palace, and decided to pull the trigger. The headline was not a question. It was an accusation. It laid bare the frequency of the visits. It detailed the … Read more

In the summer of 1929, the heir to the British throne sat in a closed room beside his youngest brother with a needle and thread in his hands, sewing to keep his own nerves steady. He was no invalid’s companion passing an idle afternoon; he was keeping watch over a prince of the blood through … Read more

On paper, it was a royal fairy tale. On the morning of July 29th, 1981, a global television audience of roughly 750 million people watched as Lady Diana Spencer, just 20 years old, married Charles, Prince of Wales, at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The ceremony was a pinnacle of royal pageantry, a real-life fairy tale designed … Read more

On a film set in Portofino, Italy, in the summer of 1960, a twenty-four-year-old singer approached an eight-year-old actress and told her he would marry her one day. Her name was Sandra Dee, and his was Bobby Darin. She later said that her first impression of him was that, aside from being rude, reckless, and … Read more

The morning of the 17th of January 1877 came up clear and hard and dead still over the town of Kestrel, a Kansas winter morning where the cold had an actual shine to it and the smoke from every chimney went straight up into a white sky because there was not one breath of wind … Read more

On the last evening of October 1955, a single sheet of paper left Clarence House and rearranged the way an entire country would remember a love story. It was short, barely a hundred words. A young woman of twenty-five had written it, or had at least put her name to it, and the wording was … Read more

She was six years old the first time the world watched her grieve in public. A small girl in a wool coat standing beside her mother, while her father’s flag-draped coffin passed on a horse-drawn caisson through the streets of Washington. By the time she turned forty-two, she had buried her father, her infant brother, … Read more