Crime

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. 

Britain’s self-styled ‘Thief-Taker General’ was not all he seemed. On 24 May 1725 Jonathan Wild was finally brought to justice.

For 18th-century smugglers in Guernsey and the Isle of Man, plague was a business opportunity.

On 11 May 1891 the future Tsar Nicholas II narrowly escaped assassination on a trip to Japan.

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia – Amedeo Feniello’s history of the Camorra – has this much in common with the case against them: it’s all about the evidence.

There was no law permitting cremation, but there was no law against it either. On 13 January 1884, a Welsh druid took the matter to trial.

The issue of assisted dying was first put before Parliament in 1936. Many of the same questions remain, but the arguments have changed.

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle about identity.