The Broken Compass

The Broken Compass

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Microhistories

Microhistories #12: revolution on the radio
How an early BBC news hoax terrified the nation
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #11: News from the dead—an Oxford resurrection
The true story of a 17th-century miracle on the gallows
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #10: John Payne Collier—scholar, slug, fraud
A few words on the greatest forger in English literary history
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #9: the poetry of steeples
A brief history of England's love affair with church bells
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #8: Little Jack, the boy missionary
A nineteenth-century story of the British in central Africa
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #7: the revolutionary life of Victoria Claflin Woodhull
The first woman to run for the US presidency – and so much more
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #6: the memory palace of Solomon Shereshevsky
The man behind Alexander Luria's classic study The Mind of a Mnemonist
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #5: the last and outmost isle
A brief history of the abandoned Scottish islands of St Kilda
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #4: the Mayerling Incident
A tragedy – and a scandal – that might have changed the course of history
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #3: the unveiling of the Menin Gate
Remembering the missing after the war to end all wars
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #2: two socialists, a romance, and a kidnapping
How the abduction of Elsa Lanchester's mother shocked late-Victorian Britain
 • Mathew Lyons
Microhistories #1: umbrellas in the mist
The Eglinton Tournament of 1839, a soggily quixotic attempt to revive the age of chivalry in early-Victorian Britain.
 • Mathew Lyons
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