History

The bulldozers had been clearing jungle for days, their crews hacking through the dense brush of Costa Rica’s Osa canton to make room for banana plantations. Then the workmen hit something strange. Buried in the earth, half-hidden by roots and undergrowth, were enormous stone balls, perfectly round and smooth, sitting in clusters as if someone … Read more

The two Gatling guns stood beside the ammunition train, their barrels clean, their mechanisms oiled, each of them capable of pouring out 350 rounds per minute. Fully loaded ammunition crates sat stacked beside them. Only a few guards watched over the weapons. No combatants. When the relief column reached those guns three days later, they … Read more

The telephone rang eleven times that morning. No one answered. Fifty-year-old Connie Bennett stood outside her son’s front door, keys in hand, telling herself everything was fine. Maybe they had overslept. Maybe the receiver had been left off the hook by mistake. Anything, she told herself, anything but the cold stone of dread settling in … Read more

In July 1911, while she was away in Belgium, the scandal broke in the Parisian press, and the name that had been whispered in the corridors of the Sorbonne became a public sensation. By the time Marie Curie returned to her home in Paris, a furious mob had gathered on her street, directly outside her … Read more

Sarah Ferguson is not supposed to be here. That is the first thing worth understanding. If you had asked a royal correspondent in 1992 whether the Duchess of York would still be a meaningful presence in royal life thirty years later, the answer would have arrived so quickly it might have sounded rehearsed. Of course … Read more

On February 12, 1929, a woman died at dawn in a villa perched on a cliff in Monaco. Her only companions were a paid nurse and two poodles barking in the next room. Her daughter refused to come. Her husband lived in another city. Yet when the news reached London, the newspapers devoted columns to … Read more

On the evening of April 14, 1972, a 27-year-old teacher stayed late at her elementary school in the small agricultural town of Perris, California, to grade her students’ spelling tests. She closed the door to Room 12 behind her at 7:30, crossed the empty parking lot, and reached her blue Chevrolet Biscayne. She never made … Read more

A bullet-riddled brown suitcase sat in the trunk of a stolen 1934 Ford Deluxe V8 when the ambush on Highway 154 ended Bonnie Parker’s life. Inside, wrapped in waxed paper, was half a fried bologna sandwich, a napkin from the Canfield Cafe, and a cold Coca-Cola pulled that morning from an ice chest on the … Read more

The managing director of Matrix Churchill, a Coventry man named Paul Henderson, had left school at fifteen and worked his way up from apprentice to the top of one of Britain’s largest machine tool makers. For roughly seventeen years, on trips behind the Iron Curtain and then into Iraq, he had been an informer for … Read more