MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done.
A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden,
The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living
James Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier. Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the
Hitoshi Imamura was a Japanese general who served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. He surrendered the Japanese forces in New Guinea and the southern Pacific Islands to Australian forces, representing the Allies, in September 1945, and was detained by the Australian Army, as he and troops
It's the fall of 1864. The war is going very badly for the Confederates. John Wilkes Booth is kind of the Brad Pitt of North America. He was a famous, dashing young actor, a committed supporter of the Southern Confederacy. A man who despised Lincoln. He begins to
It started with a suitcase hidden under a bed. It was 2009, and Antony Easton's father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father's old flat in the
Japanese singer-songwriter Yoko Ono had an obsession with artist Salvador Dalí’s surrealism, and decided she wanted to buy a strand of hair from Dalí’s famous mustache. Ono offered to pay the artist $10,000, which is the equivalent of about five or ten times that in today’s
The white marble headstone of Spc. 4 Richard Leroy McKinley may look like the other headstones in Section 31 but it marks Arlington National Cemetery's only radioactive grave and the story of America’s first fatal nuclear accident. In 1961, McKinley was serving as an operator at the
Albert Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited the estate of Margaret Wise Brown, his next-door neighbour, who had no children of her own. Ever since, as “Goodnight Moon” has drifted toward the center of America’s collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady
Authorities are scrambling to find the gang behind the heist that targeted high-security display cases in the famous French museum. The criminals, who disguised themselves as construction workers on a cherry picker, are still on the run. Authorities fear the one-of-a-kind, and therefore highly recognisable items, will be melted down
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most important spiritual sites for Christians, so it may come as some surprise that the keys to the church are entrusted to the care of two Muslim families. This tradition dates back several centuries and was reportedly instituted