Donald Crowhurst is a brilliant inventor with a failing business. When he hears about the Golden Globe Race offering publicity and cash to the fastest to sail around the world, it feels like the ...

Who will be the first to sail non-stop around the world? In 1968, The Sunday Times announces a trophy and a cash prize for ...

In the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration embarked on a curious project. Officials hired thousands of unemployed writers to produce guidebooks, children’s books, local histories, collections ...

To celebrate – or commiserate – this year’s Valentine’s Day, Tim has something a little different. Straight from the Cautionary Library of misadventures comes a bumper crop of romantic blunders, ...

Claude Shannon was brilliant. He was the Einstein of computer science… only he loved “fritterin’ away” his time building machines to play chess, solve Rubik’s cubes and beat the house at roulette. If ...

When the Financial Times uncovered the billion-dollar Wirecard fraud, it seemed like the story was over. But then the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Marsalek, vanished – leaving behind clues ...

In the gilded court of Louis XIV, 17th Century France, manners are everything. Where to sit, how to eat, what to wear – any misstep is costly. No one knows this better than François Vatel, the ...

Writer Douglas Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, used science fiction and satire to warn us about potential dangers in our future, from artificial intelligence to social ...

In 1923, legendary navigator Captain Dolly Hunter led a squadron of warships into America’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe. The mission was supposed to be a speed trial, a display of the squadron’s ...

A radical thought experiment transforms the lives of a new breed of philanthropists, as they follow the logic of altruism to extraordinary lengths. The most famous convert to the Effective Altruism ...

Steven Spielberg thought his career was finished. He was behind schedule, his actors were fighting, the crew were mutinous and worst of all, his shark was broken. It looked like Jaws was destined for ...