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Crime and punishment

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The Bloody Code: your guide to the severe legal system

The death of Domitian: how aristocrats conspired against the Roman emperor. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Q&ADid the Scottish mass-murdering cannibal Sawney Bean actually exist?

A plane crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center

9/11: Twenty years on. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Prince Charles with his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten at Windsor

Why was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle, assassinated?

British police history: everything you wanted to know. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster

What was the Chernobyl Disaster?

James VI and I.

Was James VI and I murdered?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Murder: a legal history. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Victorian London prison, Newgate. Prisoners in the exercise yard. Engraving by Gustave Doré, 1872 (Photo by Getty Images)

British prisons: everything you wanted to know. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Prisoners exercise and play sport in the courtyard of the Fleet Prison, circa 1872

Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain

The golden age of piracy: everything you wanted to know. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

What the Stasi did next. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Uncovering the truth about WW2’s Katyn massacre. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Painting of Napoleon in St Helena

Napoleon on St Helena: how exile became the French emperor's last battle

Prohibition: everything you wanted to know. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Alcohol is poured away into a New York sewer during the prohibition era, c1920

QuizProhibition: how much do you know about the US ban on booze?

British troops guard a wall during the Irish War of Independence, which bears a nationalist message

The Irish Republican Army: a brief guide

The pretenders who threatened Henry VII’s crown. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Why are we fascinated by ‘evil women’?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Four knights hack Thomas Becket to death

Europe's greatest martyr: how Thomas Becket rose from the dead. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

17th century engraving showing the execution by hanging of four witches. (Photo by Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)

QuizWould you have been accused of witchcraft?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Women prisoners in 19th-century Ireland. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Charles Sobhraj (centre) pictured in 2011, while trying to sue the Nepalese government for unlawful imprisonment

The real history of The Serpent: the true story of Charles Sobhraj

Traffickers on trial: the sensational case of Lydia Harvey. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Irregulars. From left to right: Prince Leopold (Harrison Osterfield), Jessie (Darci Shaw), Bea(Thaddea Graham), Spike (McKell David), and Billy (Jojo Macari)

The Irregulars: the real history behind Netflix’s supernatural Sherlock spinoff

Hate mail & mutilated horses: Conan Doyle investigates. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

George Edalji and the Great Wyrley killings: a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Assassinations: from the ancient world to JFK. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Why treason was so unforgivable in the Middle Ages. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.