Tim Harford

In the late 1970s, Yorkshire miner Chris Campbell sees something that terrifies him.

Isaac Merritt Singer was an unlikely feminist.

In 1612, a young woman encounters a pedlar in the British countryside.

Will the robots kill us all?

In 1800s America, something terrifying is feeding on the quiet town of Exeter.

In the 1980s, the psychologist Philip Tetlock was struck by the fact that highly respected, highly credentialed geopolitical analysts often disagreed quite fundamentally about how the cold war was going, and what the future held.

Every Sunday, in 1937, people all across American tune in to a strange broadcast.

A miscellany for your delectation.

In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are desperate for an explanation.

Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”.

One hundred years ago, on 16th February 1923, the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutenkhamun was officially opened.

There are some ideas so self-evidently bad that as you see the seeds being sown, it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from staging an intervention.

Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was known as the “Louisville Loud-mouth”, as famous for his sharp taunts and poetic put-downs as he was for his skills in the ring.

In the genius’s playground that was Bell Labs in the 1950s, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built an outguessing machine.

Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints.

Of all the wonders witnessed by Sir John Mandeville, a 14th-century English knight, none was more astonishing than the “wondirfulle” fruit of a tree he encountered on his travels in India.

It’s 1990.

It all seems very long ago, but there was a time when David Cameron was most famous for his enthusiasm for behavioural public policy, better known as “nudges”.

In the noughties, reality TV is in an arms race.

Evel Knievel, the world-famous daredevil, is planning his greatest ever stunt.

In a small black box, in a cupboard just out of reach of my desk, I keep one of my few treasured possessions: a set of Oblique Strategies cards, signed by their co-creator, the artist and musician Brian Eno.

In 1942, eight men are sent from Nazi Germany to infiltrate America.

This is a special crossover episode with Business History.

In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in the dictionary.

Born into a poor, abusive household in 1838, Victoria Woodhull doesn’t have much hope of a comfortable life.

Talented and beautiful, Molly O’Day is a rising star in 1920s Hollywood.