On April 29, 2011, a woman in a pale powder blue coat walked the length of the nave at Westminster Abbey and took her seat a few feet from the throne of England. An estimated two billion people watched her do it. The cameras found her within the first minute, because the cameras had been … Read more
In 1927, on a horse field in Canada, a quiet man in steel-rimmed spectacles watched a prince ride in a point-to-point race and found himself hoping the prince would fall and break his neck. He was not a revolutionary or an enemy of the throne. He was the prince's own private secretary, the man paid … Read more
On the afternoon of January 18, 1919, at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a 13-year-old boy suffered a seizure and stopped breathing. The room was small, the light already failing in the deep of an English winter. The boy was Prince John, the youngest son of King George V and Queen Mary. … Read more
Diana Spencer was not a naive girl from the English countryside who stumbled into the most photographed marriage of the century and found the machinery frightening. That story has been told so many times it has worn grooves into the culture, in films, memoirs, documentaries, stage productions, and no fewer than three separate television series, … Read more
In the early 1970s, inside a 20-room apartment at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret opened the drawer where she kept her gloves and found a piece of paper her husband had left for her. It was a list. According to the biographer Anne de Courcy, who spent years interviewing the man who wrote it, the list … Read more
On the morning of April 11, 1919, an elderly woman in black stood on the quayside at Yalta Harbor and watched British sailors load her trunks onto a warship. She was 71 years old. Her eldest son had been murdered nine months earlier in a basement in Yekaterinburg, along with his wife and all five … Read more
The photograph went out on a Sunday morning in March 2024, timed for Mothering Sunday in Britain. It showed Catherine, Princess of Wales, seated on a wooden garden chair surrounded by her three children, smiling in a soft cardigan. It was the first image of her released since major abdominal surgery two months earlier had … Read more
When Emperor Uda ascended to Japan’s Imperial throne in 887 at just 21 years old, he became the country’s 59th ruler—but his most enduring legacy may be the personal diary he kept throughout his decade-long reign. Known as the Imperial Diary of Emperor Uda, it is the oldest surviving diary from the Japanese court. It … Read more
On the evening of Thursday, November 6, 1952, shortly after nine o’clock, Ellsworth “Bumby” Johnson sat near the back of the Cotton Bowl Grill in Harlem, reading a folded copy of the Amsterdam News over a cooling cup of black coffee. Known throughout the neighborhood as the “King of Harlem,” he wore a modest double-breasted … Read more
On October 23, 1935, Dutch Schultz was shot inside the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, and died 22 hours later in a city hospital. The killing followed a five-day standoff that began when Schultz walked into a Harlem church and threatened a church elder, a confrontation that would unravel his entire operation. The … Read more