world war i

Alfred Daniel Wintle (known throughout most of his life as “AD”) was born in Ukraine in 1897. His father John was an English diplomat who was posted there along with his wife Teresa, Wintle’s mother. The family spent some time in Romania…

Like most people involved in espionage, Moura Budberg was largely a creature of her own invention. She spent most of her life shrouded in lies, but she knew the trick to getting people to believe them. It wasn’t just “a kernel of truth”, as…

Grigori Rasputin, the man who would be labelled by history as the dark genius at the heart of the Russian court, was born a simple peasant in the West Siberian plain in 1869. In another country his family would have been considered…

One of the more fun games historians play is constructing an alternate history - a view into the possible ways things could have happened differently. Usually a pivotal event in history is taken, a flimsy justification is found for making…

The woman who would become famous as Mata Hari, the “Eye of the Dawn”, was born in 1876 as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Her parents, Adam and Antje, were middle-class but prosperous Dutch people, living in Leeuwarden. Her father had a hat…