In a small black box, in a cupboard just out of reach of my desk, I keep one of my few treasured possessions: a set of Oblique Strategies cards, signed by their co-creator, the artist and musician ...

Evel Knievel, the world-famous daredevil, is planning his greatest ever stunt. In 1974, he wants to leap over Snake River Canyon in Idaho. The chasm is almost a third of a mile wide, much bigger ...

In 1942, eight men are sent from Nazi Germany to infiltrate America. Their mission: to sabotage critical infrastructure. Their problem: they’re idiots. Operation Pastorius soon devolves into one of ...

“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 ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett’s career – but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne’s opera house.

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 ...

Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to ...

Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America’s leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America’s leading public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton.

Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine – but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the ...