Nicholas Day
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2019 Green Earth Book Awards - Short List Sylvia Samantha White is very good at finding--she just doesn't know exactly what all her "junk" is good for, not yet at least. But when completely ridiculous disaster strikes, she springs into action and uses her junk to create solutions to the town's troubles. A charming ode to collecting, creating, and following your bliss--even when you're not entirely sure where it will lead you.
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Love is a universal and powerful emotion, but it can also be destructive. Lust can destroy; betrayal can wound. Such an often-irrational force asks questions of any society.
In this episode of Myths and Monsters, we tell the medieval romance of Tristan and Isolde, whose love affair threatened the fate of their kingdom. We explore how the abandonment of Dido by the hero Aeneas paved the way for Rome. We see how Norse attitudes to sex and marriage...
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On a hot summer's day in 1934, a horrifying discovery was made in a trunk at the left luggage office of Brighton Train Station. Two days later, a similar case was found in Kings Cross Station, London. A major police investigation began which would take an unexpected turn in the search for a murderer.
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It is one of London's great unsolved mysteries. Late one evening in May 1957, an elderly Polish Countess was travelling home from a party when she was attacked at Gloucester Road Tube station. Stabbed repeatedly on the platform, she died in hospital later that night. Her killer was never identified and, to this day, there are only theories about why Countess Teresa Łubieńska was targeted. But could there be a clue in her past? The Countess had a...
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The First World War took the lives of countless soldiers on the front line. But one man in Paris too old for combat saw this as an opportunity. Henri Landru targeted the lonely and vulnerable women left behind by the war. He seduced them with promises of marriage and lured them to houses outside Paris where the women vanished. With the police uninterested in investigating the disappearances, two women took it upon themselves to pursue Landru.
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In the early twentieth century, a new technology changed the way we consume the news forever. No long would we rely on words or still photography alone; moving pictures had arrived. The cameras would be there for the grand funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. They would be there for the flights of the first powered aircraft, and for the 1908 Olympic Games. And in 1911, they would be there to record police, soldiers, and Winston Churchill, join a gun...
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Percy Lefroy Mapleton was a talented young writer. But he was also a liar, a thief and a fantasist. By 1881, he had become fixated on a beautiful stage actress. Convinced the two of them belonged together, he concocted an elaborate fraud to win her heart. But Lefroy could not outrun his lies forever and, when exposure seemed certain, he was driven to a darker and more violent
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In 1910, the city of Newcastle was transfixed by a murder trial. A clerk had been killed on a train and his wages bag stolen with hundreds of pounds inside. Accused of the murder was a local man named John Alexander Dickman. But the evidence against him was all circumstantial and, thanks to a recent change in the law, Dickman himself would have the chance to go into the witness box. Dickman was a professional gambler, but he had never faced stakes...
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Amelia Dyer was perhaps the most prolific killer in British history. She earned a living through murder. And her victims were babies. There was a grim trade which flourished in the Victorian age. In a time when unmarried mothers were shamed and shunned, giving up children to a 'baby-farmer' was often the only option. Dyer promised mothers that for a fee she would adopt the babies and raise them as her own. In fact, she neglected and murdered them....
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Jimmy Alcott was a troubled young man. He had joined the army after leaving school, but his time in Germany ended in disgrace when he was court-martialled for the violent murder of a civilian. Spared execution by the mercy of the King, he returned to England and built a new life for himself. He had not left his violent ways behind however. In 1952, he travelled from his home in London to the village of Ash Vale in Surrey. There he staked out the railway...
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Born in 1832 the story of the Black Widow is a tale of classic Victorian murder. Cotton travelled around the north east of England marrying lonely men getting them to take out life insurance and then murdering them. Arsenic was her preferred means of killing. Once dead she would cash in their life insurance. It was not only her husbands who were the victims, she is also thought to have murdered 11 of her children/step children too. Thanks to the endeavour...
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Until its closure in 2016, Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors was one of the museum's oldest and most popular attractions. And for decades, staring out at visitors was the waxwork of a notorious Victorian double killer, the murderer of a young mother and baby - a woman named Mary Pearcey. In this episode, we reveal how the trouble Pearcey began an affair with her victim's husband. How she inserted herself into the family's life. How she lured her...
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Forest and mountain, sea and ice – the wilds of this world are a rich setting for myths and legends. As this episode shows, the stories told about the wilderness – and the monsters feared lurking within it – can tell us a lot about a people.
The city-loving Ancient Greeks saw it as a realm of the divine – and a dangerous place for mortals. The Norse were master sailors, yet imagined the seas filled with terrifying monsters. The Celts of...
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We all think we know the story of Jack the Ripper. The most famous serial killer in history, the man who murdered five women on the streets of Whitechapel – and got away with it.
In this two-part Murder Maps special, we re-examine those notorious crimes. We reveal how the story we know today was shaped by the sensationalist press of 1888. And we strip back decades of rumour and misinformation to reveal the true lives of the five women slain. ...
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It was a crime which shocked Britain. In 1878, a widow was killed in her own home - and the killer was her own servant. This was a murder which struck at the heart of Victorian society, at the sanctity of the home and the rigid divides between the classes. For the young Kate Webster did not only kill and dismember her employer – she stole her clothes, her property and her identity. And to the Victorians that was almost more monstrous than the murder...