In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are desperate for an explanation. Could humans really create something so complex without anyone spotting ...

Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”. Discipline means that sooner or later, uneconomic ideas fail.

One hundred years ago, on 16th February 1923, the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutenkhamun was officially opened. Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian pharaohs is known to incur a deadly curse, so why did a ...

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. So it was with Bad Girl Books, which earlier ...

https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/flight-of-the-fantasist-the-race-around-the-world-part-2 https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim ...

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 1963, Clay ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine – but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the ...

1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he’s just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a ...

He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett’s career – but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne’s opera house.

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

Blitzkrieg means “lightning war”, but despite the German name it was not a German invention. Back in 1917 a brilliant English officer developed a revolutionary way to use the latest development in ...