Strange phenomena have always drawn crowds and history is replete with miracles that have been witnessed by many people

John Blair Killing the Dead Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 536pp. Princeton University Press. £30 (US $35). A dead body, as anyone who has sat with one will know, is an unsettling

An archæological mystery, first noticed accidentally due to aerial photography in 1933, is etched across the hillside of Monte Sierpe (Serpent Mountain) in the Pisco Valley in southern Peru. It takes

Rue des Colonels Renard, near the Arc de Triomphe in the 17th arrondissement, is situated in a well-heeled part of Paris, featuring fashionable apartments at vertigo-inducing rents. In the late 1930s

ny potential reader of A Glastonbury Romance is likely to be put off initially by its sheer size: this brick of a book runs to more than 1,100 pages, containing almost half a million words. Some autho

Collecting fields often have holy grails, and in medieval illuminated manuscripts one is the Roman d’Alexandre or Romance of Alexander. The 20cm-tall book, written in Old French and illustrated with 1