Kathryn Hughes

6 days ago | wsj.com | Kathryn Hughes

For the author, one of the biggest deprivations of the pandemic was the end of a beloved ritual: swapping gossip with friends. At its most basic, gossip is one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present. In “You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” Kelsey McKinney argues that gossip, far from a sign of a second-rate mind or a shaky moral constitution, is an essential life skill and an important way to strengthen social bonds.

3 weeks ago | msn.com | Kathryn Hughes

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3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Kathryn Hughes

In the canon of British true crime, the case of Dr Crippen routinely gets billed as the first “modern” murder. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly original about the doctor’s motives or methods: in January 1910 he slipped poison into his wife’s bedtime drink so that he could marry his secretary instead. Rather, it was the way that Crippen was caught that turned this run-of-the-mill suburban love triangle into an international cause célèbre.

1 month ago | msn.com | Kathryn Hughes

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Kathryn Hughes

When 13-year-old Pearl Pufeles disembarked from the cattle car at Auschwitz in March 1944, she was surprised to hear the strains of Dvořák and Smetana wafting towards her. “Gosh,” thought the Czechoslovakian schoolgirl, “this can’t be that bad if they play music here.” But it was that bad and, indeed, so much worse. Pearl and her twin sister Helen were swiftly selected as laboratory fodder for Dr Josef Mengele’s grotesque medical experiments. It isn’t clear which orchestra Pearl had heard that day.