Key events

Q I am trying to work out what Joseph Mellor Vernon (1886–1953) did during the First World War. A pottery worker living in Porthill, Stoke-on-Trent, he married Phoebe Turner in 1911 and they had three

Part two

The idea of human levitation is, by its very nature, subversive and surreal. The phenomenon – if we temporarily accept such a thing in order to examine it – involves events that imply that our underst

In the summer of 1924, Scientific American’s ‘Special Correspondent in Great Britain’ warned his readers that, “the size and scope of the British Empire Exhibition, like the British empire itself, is

I thought about taking a DNA test for years. My paternal grandfather was illegitimate and so was a great-grandmother and her mother! But I hesitated. If I’m honest I wondered whether spending that amo

On 12 August 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into the pre-dawn Florida sky on a mission to become the first-ever spacecraft to ‘touch the Sun’.