Crime and punishment

Hallie Rubenhold.

“The lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims were not what we have been conditioned to believe”: 5 minutes with Hallie Rubenhold

A real Peaky Blinder mug-shot

In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like?

Cillian Murphy stars in Peaky Blinders. (Photo by Alamy)

The real Peaky Blinders

People gather around the Mona Lisa painting after its return in January 1914

Mona Lisa heist: how do you steal the world’s most famous painting?

The Kray brothers

The A-Z of gangs and gangsters

A woman on a medieval ducking stool

Q&A Q&A: Were ducking stools ever used as punishment for crimes other than witchcraft during the Middle Ages?

An 18th-century public execution and crowd

Q&A When did people stop attending public executions in Britain?

Criminal register photographs at Wormwood Scrubs prison, around 1890. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

Prisoner dilemmas

19th-century mugshots

The real Peaky Blinders

Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico's left-wing president who in 1940 legalised drugs. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The year Mexico legalised drugs

One of the earliest and most famous examples of extremism comes from ancient Rome. Starting in 264 BC and continuing for more than a century, Rome engaged in a series of wars with neighbouring Carthage. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of extremism – from ancient Rome to al Qaeda

Sir Walter Raleigh bids goodbye to his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton

Q&A Why was Sir Walter Ralegh executed?

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark. The BBC television drama is putting Cornwall’s coastline at risk of

Poldark, Peaky Blinders and 6 other historical TV shows that have tourists flocking to Britain

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen, who supplied the gun with which she shot David Blakely. (Photo by Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo)

Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

Charles I. (Photo by World History Archive/Alamy)

King killers in America