t3003

On November 22, 1963, at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Jackie Kennedy stood in a corridor still wearing her raspberry pink Chanel suit. It was soaked in her husband's blood. His brain matter was still on her stockings, her gloves, and her hands. Lady Bird Johnson approached her and gently offered a change of clothes. … Read more

On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, someone built a sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. It was not a metaphor. Boxes of textbooks, each weighing between 40 and 65 pounds, were arranged in an L-shaped barrier along the southeast corner window. The arrangement faced Elm Street. It faced … Read more

In 1965, Harlem operated as a kingdom built on secrets. It was a city within a city, a labyrinth of brownstones and jazz clubs, of high-stakes poker games in the back rooms of barber shops and deals made in the shadows of the elevated train tracks. To the outside world, it looked like chaos. To … Read more

On the evening of August 19, 1950, Bumpy Johnson walked into the Lennox Tavern at the corner of 135th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. He was accompanied by three associates, all of them well dressed, having just finished a business meeting at a nearby restaurant. Johnson was 44 years old and had … Read more

In a Copenhagen studio in 1862, Prince Christian of Denmark posed with his family against a painted backdrop. The photograph shows a respectable royal household of middle rank, arranged in the stiff formal style that thousands of European families adopted that year. Christian stands in the back row in dress uniform, flanked by his two … Read more

For nearly thirty years, Dodi Fayed has existed in the British tabloid imagination as a kind of ghost. He is remembered less as a man than as a single photograph and a single adjective: Egyptian playboy, party boy, the boyfriend in the car. That version erases almost everything. It leaves out his childhood, his mother, … Read more

In April 1919, a British dreadnought called HMS Marlborough dropped anchor off the port of Yalta on the Black Sea coast of Crimea. The White Army was collapsing inland, and Bolshevik columns were moving south fast. The ship had been dispatched personally by King George V of England to rescue his aunt before the Reds … Read more

The most famous claim about the Queen Mother and Prince Philip is that she hated him more than anyone alive. It is a story that has been repeated in tabloid headlines and television dramas for decades. It also rests almost entirely on one badly chosen word: hatred. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. … Read more