On 20 August 1989, 21-year-old Lyle Menendez and his 18-year-old brother, Erik, burst into their parents’ Beverly Hills mansion and shot them dead. They later claimed to have done it because their parents had sexually abused them. In 1996, following …
The empathy of Joseph Stalin
Once a book-hoarder, always one. In 1899, a promising young poet and would-be revolutionary dropped out of the theological seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia. He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and …