The spookiest feeling I have had, in several decades of looking at old silent films, is watching an old lady dressed in bonnet and long dress, shuffling around the driveway of a house in Roundhay, Leeds.

The woman is Sarah Robinson Whitley, who was born almost 200 years ago, in 1816. I was suddenly...

When Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, fell to Islamic State (IS) in June 2014, the aspiring caliphate stepped up its campaign to expand and consolidate its control over the region. It did this in part by trying to exterminate the thinly protected enclaves of assorted ethnic and religious groups on the Nineveh Plains.

This entailed a...

As of 2014, there were approximately 39 million people aged 16-24 in the US, and 5.4 million of them were neither employed nor in school. That’s almost 14% of the age cohort, or more than two-and-a-half times the national rate of unemployment.

These 5.4 million...