Liam Shaw

When​ Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane VSS Unity made its third commercial flight on 8 September 2023, its three crew members were accompanied by three paying customers, ‘private astronauts’ who had bought their tickets as long ago as 2004 (when they were a bit less than half the current asking price of $450,000). Ken Baxter, a Las Vegas real-estate investor; the British racing...

The old​ Palais de Justice in Lyon is one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in France. Its entrance hall is flanked with marble columns, and winged lions prowl the architraves.Between 1845 and 1995, it housed the major courts for the surrounding region. From 1912, access to the world’s first official police forensic laboratory was gained by entering through a back...

On an atoll​ in the Indian Ocean, on an April day in 1836 when the water was unusually smooth, Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought,...

Afew hours​ after Jean-Paul Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a safe experience. An...