Books

Rasputin was murdered in December 2016 (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty) The plot was to murder Rasputin. The bait was to use Princess Irina – a demure 21-year-old niece of Tsar Nicholas II – as a “sexual lure”. The trap was the Moika Palace, the opulent home of one of the richest …

Charles Guiteau fires twice at President Garfield (Image: Getty) When Charles Julius Guiteau strode across a train concourse in July 1881, he had been away from a retreat known as both “utopia” and the “devil’s garden” for 15 years. How clear, and how fond, Charles’s memories were of his time …

Drury has become the world’s best-known extreme tourist (Image: Adam Gerrard) Andrew Drury left school at 16 with average qualifications and a vague ambition that he might become a painter and decorator. It was an ambition he fulfilled, and then some. He now runs his own successful building firm employing …

The view of Martin Luther King’s assassin (Image: Getty) In 2019 a group of “concerned citizens” was formed, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). The TRC membership included numerous Hollywood celebrities who believe the assassination of Martin Luther King (and John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Malcolm X) was …

Bestselling Anglo-Australian author Jane Harper (Image: GETTY) The promise of a new life in Australia has long intrigued the British, and over the past 80 years millions of us have travelled to the opposite end of the planet in search of a new life or, at the very least, a …

More than half of adults wish they got the chance to read more – and one in four admit the only time they open a book is on holiday. A survey of 5,000 adults found they go abroad an average of once a year, reading an average of 2.3 books …

First, it was Roald Dahl, then Ian Fleming’s James Bond and now the latest classic works to be considered for censorship are much-loved fairy tales. Ladybird books have reportedly been using sensitivity readers to reconsider problematic aspects of tales like Snow White and Cinderella. It turns out inclusion experts are …

In bed on Burns Night 2003, Judith can’t sleep and then hears strange noises in the house. It turns out that Professor Cedric Gilbert has been murdered, bashed over the head with a bust of Socrates. Who killed the professor and why has his research assistant Jared Kumar disappeared? Did …

Some of the UK’s most loved bedtime stories for children are more than 50 years old, research shows. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, written by Eric Carle, and Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came For Tea have stood the test of time for decades and are still often read by parents …

The devastation of the Great Fire of London was catastrophic (Image: GETTY) The cracking and roaring of the blaze could be heard 40 miles away in Oxford, like the rushing of a great wind. Lead roofs turned to molten metal rivers, stones splintered and the human victims – officially, there …