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

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

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

Do older people see more ghosts? In the 1985 film version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a character refers to the tendency of older people to believe in ghosts, remarking “that it’s difficult, a

LETTER FROM LONDON AHMED: HAYLEY BENOIT; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION ...

Graveyard hangouts in the German capital are increasingly popular, offering waffles and cappuccinos among the tombstones