On September 8, 1943, the Second World War took a dramatic turn as Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had just replaced a deposed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister, announced an armistice between Fascist Italy and the Allied Powers. The following day, a large Italian naval fleet, on its way to counter the Allied amphibious landings… Read More »
Humphrey Bogart as world-weary bar owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. Audrey Hepburn as socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Keanu Reeves as kung-fu cyberpunk freedom fighter Neo in The Matrix. What do all these very different fictional characters have in common? You… Read More »
On the morning September 2, 1945, delegates from the victorious Allied powers and the defeated Empire of Japan gathered aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, to sign Japan’s official instrument of surrender. By 9:23, the ceremony was over; after 6 brutal years and over 75 million deaths, the Second World War was… Read More »
By the winter of 1944 and 1945, the German Third Reich was in dire straits. Adolf Hitler’s final offensive in the Ardennes had failed, the Soviet Red Army was driving ever closer to Germany’s borders, and day and night Allied bomber aircraft were pummelling German cities into smoking rubble. With the end in sight, the… Read More »
Pop quiz: who was the first woman in space? Many of you probably just answered Dr. Sally Ride, who launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983. But you would be wrong: Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, not the first overall. That honour belongs to a now scarcely remembered… Read More »
Oysters. Chocolate. Opium. Ginseng. Spanish Fly. Ambergris. Alcohol. MDMA. What do all of these have in common? Well, aside from the makings of a very wild party, they have all at one time or another been used as aphrodisiacs. Derived from the Greek aphrodisiakon or “pertaining to Aphrodite”, goddess of love, aphrodisiacs are substances believed… Read More »
From October 1945 to October 1948, almost 1,700 Nazi officers and officials underwent the famous Nuremberg trials, charged with committing war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The trials resulted in 200 death sentences, while 279 defendants were to serve life prison terms. Similar trials for similar charges were conducted in Tokyo, from… Read More »
Take a flight 400 kilometres due south from the Peruvian capital of Lima, and you will find yourself over the Pampas de Jumana, an 80 kilometre stretch of coastal desert sandwiched between the Andes foothills and the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the driest regions on earth, receiving less than 4mm of rain a… Read More »
We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the… Read More »
In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But… Read More »
If you were a pilgrim or other traveller during the Middle Ages, you would have faced a whole host of dangers on the road, from bandits and pirates to harsh weather to wolves in the forest. But the encounter you would have feared most was with ghostly figures standing at the side of the road,… Read More »