A mysterious stranger offers you £1 billion, but there’s a catch - an immortal, super-intelligent snail appears and will chase you down for the rest of your life, and if it ever touches you - you die. Would you take the deal? I love asking stupid theoretical questions like this - they always spark a great discussion, with people throwing out the craziest ideas - and during a discussion about The Immortal Snail on a recent night out reminded me of one of my favourite stories o

No, it isn’t the name of a movie, but rather an interesting event in the early Cold War. Let me take you to the 4th August 1945, three months after the surrender of Germany, two days before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and eleven days before the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII. American ambassador W. Averell Harriman is given a carved wooden copy of the US Great Seal by some Soviet Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union children as a gift of peace and frien

Sometimes, what at first appears to be the most standard of paintings can have the most unusual of stories. In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire: winter evening after rain , oil painting by Andrew MacCallum When I first saw Andrew MacCallum’s In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire: winter evening after rain in the V&A, I saw it as a fairly typical painting - a very beautifully painted rendition of Sherwood Forest, with intricate barren trees silhouetted by a glowing winter sky,

Tyrannosaurus rex is without doubt the world’s most famous dinosaur. It’s the one dinosaur everybody knows, the only species known by its full name and quite possibly the biggest carnivore to ever walk the Earth. To many it represents the ultimate predator. It’s no wonder T. rex is almost guaranteed to appear in any form of dinosaur media. Whether it be books, games and of course films and documentaries like Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs. It’s crazy to think then t

While volunteering at the D-Day story in my third year, I got to spend a lot of time on LCT 7074, their landing craft outdoors. On board are two tanks, an American Sherman “Grizzly” and a British Churchill Crocodile (which I will refer to as the Croc from now on). The Churchill tanks (full designation “Tank, Infantry, Mk IV (A22) Churchill”) are my favourite tanks of the war and all time, so of course I was overjoyed to spend time with one. Figure 1: The front of the Croc wit

An overarching event during the cold war was the so-called “Space Race” between the United States and Soviet Union, culminating in the famous Apollo 11 landing on the moon on the 20th July 1969. It was, and still often is, regarded that the Americans won the race due to this event, however the Soviets managed to achieve many things before and after the Americans. These include first artificial satellite in orbit ( Sputnik 1 , 1957), the first manned space flight ( Yuri Gagar