3+ hour, 24+ min ago  (529+ words) Jug up George, as his friends call him on account of his love of a pint, is, at 83 years old, the lifeblood of Battersea. Born, bombed and bred in the place that almost killed him, he still loves it more…...

2+ day, 23+ hour ago  (561+ words) When Benito Mussolini met Adolf Hitler in April 1944, the Italian dictator had in his pocket a list of requests which reveal the extent of his dependence on the German leader as the Allies turned the tide in the Second World…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago  (414+ words) I never thought that a call from my grandma Suzi asking me to help to move some of her paintings would change my life. It was January 2015. I was 20 at the time. She was 93. And when I say my grandma…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago  (704+ words) As a microcosm, the hotel works so well (something the journalist Lyse Doucet found in her own similarly structured book The Finest Hotel in Kabul). Lutetia was Paris's name in Roman times, and the hotel shares the city's motto, fluctuat…...

4+ week, 2+ day ago  (504+ words) The Nomura Residence in the samurai district of Kanazawa is an elegant house in a historic neighbourhood of this Japanese city. It has many desirable features, if not all mod-cons, including an enclosed garden with a pond and a carefully…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago  (956+ words) Before starting as a modern history student at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s, Jonathan Carley devoted much of his time to acting. His roles at school ranged from a minor part in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure to playing…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago  (1179+ words) Peter MacDonald was at a New Mexico boarding school for Navajo children when Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor dragged America into the Second World War. MacDonald, lying about his age, did so " setting himself on a course that would…...

1+ mon, 4+ week ago  (1173+ words) On weekend duty around a decade ago, Steve Brown received the message that everyone in his "war detectives" unit at Imjin Barracks in Gloucestershire feared. A Royal Navy submarine with some 150 sailors aboard was missing in "northern seas". Was Britain…...

2+ mon, 1+ hour ago  (1401+ words) In the final months of the Second World War, as his unit retreated in the face of Allied advances with barely a shot fired, Karl Hoffmann, the German linguist and SS officer, developed a ritual. Once a day, he would…...

2+ mon, 3+ hour ago  (842+ words) Perched at the foot of the Pyrenees, the medieval stone village of Oloron-Sainte-Marie claims to be the birthplace of the French beret. There was a time when everyone in Oloron was a beret maker, or related to one. It is…...