First reports of Ebola

In 1958, the British oil tanker, SS San Flaviano, was sunk in the harbour of Balikpapan, Indonesia, while a rebellion was underway against President Ahmed Sukarno. It’s reported the bomb was dropped b...

20 Okt 202510min

The first Moomins story about a family of nature-loving white round trolls was published in 1945 during World War Two. The Moomins and the Great Flood was created by writer and artist Tove Jansson as ...

17 Okt 202510min

In 1995, a single 30-something woman with big knickers and blue soup first appeared in a weekly column, published by British newspaper The Independent.Initially written anonymously by journalist Helen...

16 Okt 202511min

In 1965, two writers were accused of publishing anti-Soviet material abroad.The arrest of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky was seen as symbolic of the new era in the Soviet Union. The liberal leader N...

15 Okt 20259min

In 1961, the Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges won the Formentor Prize for literature.Borges’ stories were characterised by mind-bending plots often featuring labyrinths, dreams ...

14 Okt 202510min

Published in 1991, Faceless Killers was the first of Henning Mankell’s crime novels featuring police inspector Kurt Wallander. The series changed the world of crime writing, introducing gritty social ...

13 Okt 202510min

In 2001, a few months after 9/11, economist Jim O’Neill was working at Goldman Sachs when he wrote a report about which countries might become big players in the world economy. That’s when he came up ...

10 Okt 20259min

Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1945, World War II surrender ceremonies took place across the Japanese Empire.The one in China was held at the Forbidden City in Beijing bringing an end to eight yea...

9 Okt 202510min