Forrest Fenn never does things the regular way. Despite no formal training and little knowledge of art, he becomes a millionaire gallery owner. An outsider by nature, Fenn’s charm, audacity, ...

The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First World War. When a worker ...

Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel – the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch – in fact, early true crime? A hit book – The Truth About ...

Last week, Cautionary Tales told the tragic story of Derek Bentley, exploring Britain’s troubled relationship with capital punishment. Across the Atlantic, Revisionist History ...

In the late 1930s, a Dutch civil servant, Jacobus Lentz, designed a near-unforgeable identity card. In 1940, the Dutch government rejected his proposal as too intrusive. Weeks later, Germany ...

An amateurish burglary in 1950s London ends in murder. One of the men involved is a 19-year-old named Derek Bentley. Bentley has the understanding of a child – and he wasn’t the ...

The first term of my master’s degree in economics was an alarming experience. The econometrics was bewildering. The macroeconomics was even more mysterious. Everything was drenched in ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

Adi and Rudi Dassler made sports shoes together – until a feud erupted between them. They set up competing companies, Adidas and Puma, and their bitter rivalry divided the sporting world, their family ...