Malcolm Gaskill

On​ 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More...

In​ the summer of 1942, an Oxfordshire housewife began a series of brief encounters with a man who was not her husband. They met at a café in Birmingham and then in Banbury on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings...

Afew weeks ago,​ a man appeared in my front garden as I was trimming the hedge. Slight in stature, in his early twenties with short dark hair, he was wearing a huge hold-all as though it were a rucksack. His unsmiling face radiated intensity as he began his spiel: name, from the North, recent discharge from the army, trying to get back on his feet. He even gave his service number, as if old...

The world they sought to understand belonged to them all, and demanded that a gifted few should work together to interpret the writings of former ages. Alchemists resembled learned theologians poring over the gospels, wary of mangling a single meaning and so missing or misrepresenting a holy truth. And with alchemy, everything needed interpretation because everything was obscure.