History

On a windy April night in 2014, Mark Shand stepped out of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York for a cigarette. He had just concluded the most successful night of his life, raising millions for the elephants he adored, standing at the absolute summit of his career. The man who had survived shipwrecks, headhunters, … Read more

The biologist walked into the government meeting in Peshawar carrying a terrain map, asking for a budget of eight million dollars and a plan that everyone seated around the table said would fail within the first winter. He had already been told as much by three different ministerial departments before he ever reached this room. … Read more

In the small hours of March 24, 1603, Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. She was sixty-nine years old and had ruled England for forty-four years. The Tudor line died with her. For the final days of her life, she had refused to lie down, sitting propped on cushions heaped on the … Read more

Rose Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier could not have been built from more different materials. One was Boston discipline and daily mass, polished in a household where punctuality was a sacrament and toughness a family heirloom. The other was French refinement and a fierce hunger for privacy, assembled in a world of quiet rooms and good … Read more

There was no title, no preamble, only the dry request from a doctor’s table. In September 1941, in a private hospital room in Washington, D. C. , a twenty-three-year-old woman was given a sedative, then a local anesthetic, and doctors drilled two holes into her skull while she was still awake enough to answer questions. … Read more

The cart left London in July 1536, and nobody was allowed to watch it go. No procession, no heralds, no black velvet draped over the sides. Inside was a lead coffin, and inside that, sealed away from the summer air, the body of a seventeen-year-old boy. He was Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, … Read more

In the early hours of July 12, 1926, Gertrude Bell lay down in her Baghdad bedroom and did not rise again. Beside the bed stood a small bottle of sleeping pills, and whether the dose that ended her life was a mistake born of exhaustion or a deliberate release from decades of weariness has never … Read more

On a sunny winter afternoon in Manhattan, twenty-five-year-old Dorothy Arnold stepped out of her family’s brownstone mansion in a tailored blue velvet suit, planning nothing more ambitious than a walk down Fifth Avenue. She bought a box of chocolates, picked up a book of humorous essays at a bookstore, exchanged cheerful words with an acquaintance … Read more

She sat across the table from Stalin himself through the winter of 1937, dressed in diamonds, smiling as his secret police executed hundreds of thousands within sight of the Kremlin walls. She was Marjorie Merriweather Post, the richest self-made woman in America and the head of an industrial empire called General Foods. Foreign diplomats in … Read more