Sir Alan Lascelles, universally known as Tommy, spent a lifetime learning that royal people making up their own minds could be extremely dangerous. By the summer of 1946, Princess Elizabeth had made up her mind about Philip. Lascelles noticed both facts. He was not a romantic man by profession. He served as King George VI's … Read more
In the eastern hills of Kentucky, where the ridges draw so close together they resemble the knuckles of a closed hand, there was once a county called Caldwell. And in that county there was a piece of land that appeared on no map with a name. In the autumn of 1856, the state land office … Read more
On April 17, 2021, only 30 mourners were allowed inside St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle under pandemic restrictions. A widowed queen sat entirely alone. Among the family faces was a 30th name that stood out: Penelope Knatchbull, the daughter of a London butcher who had built a steakhouse fortune. For 46 years, she had … Read more
When Aristotle Onassis died in Paris on March 15, 1975, he had spent much of his final year trying to end his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as painfully as the law would allow. The wedding photographs from Scorpios told a different story. So did the public statements. The documentary record tells the truth. The … Read more
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was born on June 30, 1892, in Duisburg, then part of the German Empire. He was the fifth of eight children of a blacksmith. After graduating from school in 1912, he became a full-time soldier in the German Navy, training in Germany as well as the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. During World … Read more
Am Morgen des 14. Oktober 1944 ist der Krieg für Deutschland verloren. Das weiß inzwischen jeder in dem Haus auf dem Hügel über dem Dorf Herlingen im Südwesten Deutschlands. Aber niemand sagt es laut, denn der Mann am Frühstückstisch ist einer der mächtigsten Soldaten des Dritten Reiches. Sein Name ist Erwin Rommel. Er ist 52 … Read more
In November 1877, two brothers walked out of a cabin in a hollow in northwest Arkansas to run their trap line. They told a neighbor they would be gone three or four days. They were gone fifteen. What came back, according to the only written account of the case, was not what left. The account … Read more
When Jacqueline Kennedy stepped onto the private Greek island of Skorpios on October 20, 1968, the world saw a fairy tale. The most photographed widow on earth was marrying Aristotle Onassis, a shipping magnate 23 years her senior. The wedding was treated as a cultural phenomenon, a merger of American political fame and Greek commercial … Read more
In January 1945, at a frozen crossroads outside Houffalize, Belgium, heavy snow blanketed the pine trees and the bodies of the dead. A group of German soldiers stood in the middle of the road with their hands raised, having surrendered after a bitter hour-long firefight in the blinding white storm. American infantrymen moved down the … Read more
Amon Leopold Göth was born on December 11, 1908, in Vienna, then part of Austria-Hungary. He grew up in a bourgeois household sustained by a book and art publishing business, a setting that offered comfort but little emotional warmth. As a child and adolescent, Göth showed little discipline and frequently clashed with authority figures. After … Read more