Books

Red Rum claims victory in the 1973 Grand National (Image: PA) It’s Saturday March 31, 1973, and we’re about to witness one of the greatest horse races of all time. Yet even though the winner would go on to become the nation’s favourite racehorse, at the time he was considered …

Marrell McCollough tends the mortally-wounded Martin Luther King as onlookers point towards assassin (Image: Joseph Louw/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty/AP Photo/Charles Kelly) The gunshot ripped apart the evening calm outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, 55 years ago this Tuesday. Its echoes would reverberate across the world. Dr Martin Luther …

White-haired stranger Snorri emerges from a frozen wilderness and offers to recount a saga to Viking warlord Sven Ravenfeeder and his men in exchange for food and water. But the brutal warrior drops a noose around Snorri’s neck and tells him: “If we like your story, you will live…” Snorri …

The Fourth Haunting is a full-length paranormal thriller, F.G. Cottam’s latest foray into the world of the unknown, the uncertain and the sometimes very disconcerting. Its central character is Tom Carter, introduced at the outset as Britain’s most celebrated ghosthunter, as he pitches the idea for his latest TV series …

Dick King-Smith (R), grandson Tom Fisher, daughter Liz Rose and great-granddaughter Josie Rogers (Image: Handout) The sternest critic Dick King-Smith ever faced was his wife Myrle. Every evening, after hours spent at his typewriter, the multi-million-selling children’s author would emerge from his study with new pages from his latest animal-themed …

Insiders at the publishing house told the Telegraph that sensitivity readers have been hard at work erasing the author’s original work. The outlet has seen digital versions of new editions that include many changes to Christie’s work penned between 1920-76. Passages that have been edited or erased include “descriptions, insults …

Vaseem Khan (Image: Charlotte Graham) Towering over Mumbai is the world’s most expensive private residence. The 27-storey, $2billion Antilia skyscraper is home to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and his family. Like something from a James Bond film, the 400,000 sq ft building boasts a ballroom, three helipads, nine lifts …

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 …