Sherlock Holmes is known for approaching all mysteries with cool logic – and yet when his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw ...

Christmas is the time of year to worry about two things: running out of money, and playing board games. To mark the festive season,  Tim is joined by creator of Magic: The Gathering, Richard ...

The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents ...

Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to ...

Cautionary Conversation: Steve Jobs hated his phone so much that he smashed it against a wall. He also referred to mobile carriers as “orifices”. Yet he went on to invent the world’s most popular ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from. 900 ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

Torrey Canyon was one of the biggest and best ships in the world – nevertheless its captain and crew needlessly steered it towards a deadly reef known as The Seven Stones. This risky manoeuvre seems ...

Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine – but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the ...