Travel back in time to the years of the Second World War - as you've almost certainly never known them before. Author David Ebsworth tells the "stranger than fiction" stories behind his 2021 novel, A Betrayal [...]

Most historians agree that Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot of France was the constructor of the first true automobile. Cugnot’s vehicle was a huge, heavy, steam-powered tricycle, and his model of 1769 was said to have run for 20 minutes at [...]

Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson was a passionate, temperamental and controversial woman. Although she married three times and was an infamous seducer, she never experienced happiness with any of her husbands or lovers. She won international [...]

Serendipity is a remarkable phenomenon which describes a most beneficial outcome achieved purely by chance. We will see that a significant number of scientific discoveries throughout history have been made by mistake; such that the [...]

In the late 15 th Century, the Spanish Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand, used their children to create a complex web of alliances mainly to curtail the power of France.Two of their daughters, Catalina and [...]

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun exerted her considerable charm to become the friend, and then official portraitist, of Marie Antoinette. Though profitable, this role made her a public and controversial figure, and in 1789 it precipitated [...]