Ysenda Maxtone Graham

After reading​ Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin’s concise history of the Strand, you will never walk down that street again without thinking of the hippopotami that wallowed in a primeval swamp at the Trafalgar Square end. The bones of the hippos, as well as those of ‘herds of straight-tusked elephants and prides of lions’, were unearthed in 1957, when Uganda House was...

Never​ trust a man who can’t settle, I thought to myself, as I was reading Hallie Rubenhold’s book. That was Hawley Harvey Crippen. No sooner had he found his feet in a new job than he was on the move again, whether out of eagerness, boredom, impatience or disillusionment, it’s impossible to know. Even reading about these moves is tiring. It must have been exhausting for...

On​ 24 March 1953, the day on which, at 10.20 p.m., Queen Mary would breathe her last, a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician called Beresford Wallace Brown, who had arrived in England in 1950 and now worked in a dairy in Shepherd’s Bush, was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs...

Rather​ D.J. Taylor than me, when it comes to untangling the unbelievably complicated and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril Connolly during his years as editor of the short-lived literary magazine (1939-50). Was Connolly still carrying on his affair with Diana Witherby when he started his affair with Lys (while still married to...