Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

Until recently, the prime minister was the most important person in British politics. But when the New Statesman published its annual list of the most powerful people on the left in June last year, ...

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to climb out of the penurious doldrums of lockdown with a long read that went ...