Every story, every era. Researched and retold.
Modern
Just after midnight on 3 December 1984, a cloud of poison gas settled over a sleeping Indian city, and thousands were dead by morning. The story of the world's worst industrial disaster - and how avoidable it all was.
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Modern
Orbital death-mirrors, 188-tonne tanks, stealth flying wings, and a supergun aimed at London - the real, documented weapons programs of the Third Reich read like pulp science fiction. The engineering astonishes; the history warns.
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Mythology
A guided tour of the Norse cosmos - from the golden halls of Asgard to the fire-realm of Muspelheim and the cold country of the dead - all of it hanging from the branches of one doomed and undying World Tree.
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Mythology
From the cucumber-loving river kappa to the snow woman who freezes travellers in the storm, a field guide to the strange, beautiful, and terrifying spirits of Japanese folklore - and why the monsters never died.
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Medieval
In the summer of 1518, hundreds of people in Strasbourg danced uncontrollably in the streets for weeks on end - and some danced themselves to death. Five centuries on, the strangest documented epidemic in history still has no agreed explanation.
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Ancient
Centuries before Oxford or Bologna, a residential university in Bihar drew thousands of students from across Asia — until it was sacked and its great library burned around 1193. The story of Nalanda, and the fire that ended it.
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Medieval
For three centuries a Hindu empire held southern India against the tide of history — building a capital that travellers compared to Rome, and falling in 1565 in one of the most complete acts of urban destruction ever recorded. The rise, splendour and ruin of Vijayanagara.
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Ancient
A corroded lump of bronze pulled from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck turned out to be a geared astronomical computer — a technology the world would not build again for some 1,400 years. The strange, century-long story of decoding the Antikythera mechanism.
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Medieval
He built forests of impaled bodies to terrify an empire, lent his name to the world's most famous vampire, and is a national hero in his own country. Separating the real Vlad III from the monster of fiction.
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Ancient
It is older than the pyramids, built over 1,500 years, and made partly of stones dragged 200 km from Wales. Five thousand years on, we still can't agree what Stonehenge was actually for.
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Modern
Over a hundred English colonists vanished from Roanoke Island, leaving a single word carved in a post: CROATOAN. Four centuries on, the likeliest answer to America's oldest mystery has been hiding in plain sight.
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Mythology
Snake hair, a stone-turning stare, a hero's trophy - everyone knows the monster. Far fewer know that in the most famous version she was a beautiful woman punished for her own assault. The many faces of Medusa.
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