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

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A round 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. H

One morning, after 65-year-old Chonthirat Sakulku had been bedridden for two years with deteriorating health, her brother found that she had stopped breathing and assumed she was dead. He alerted the

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

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