defiance
People who were told no and heard it as a dare.
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Toothbrush at Holloway
She trained Emmeline Pankhurst to throw rocks under a fir tree at twilight, and the first one flew backwards.
The Woman Who Drew Sound
She quit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop within months of founding it, because the hearing-protection rule was applied only to her.
The Tweed Jacket in Nuristan
What does a man who crossed the Empty Quarter twice on a camel pack for a Himalayan winter?
The Valet
How does a disguise that fooled 116 French sailors for sixteen months collapse the instant its wearer steps onto a Tahitian beach?
The Queen's Poet
What do you do when a voice in your head orders you to write, the verse is catastrophic, and the Queen's polite rejection reads, to you, like a coronation?
The Surgeon Who Wouldn't Give It Back
She was exchanged man-for-man for a Confederate major, and that wasn't even the strangest thing about her wedding.
The Woman Who Wouldn't Look Up
She rode on crusade, got hauled out of Antioch in the dead of night, was caught fleeing in men's clothes at fifty, ran England at sixty-seven — and then she designed her own tomb.
The Woman Who Stole the Car
Why did a woman in 1888 push an automobile down an alley at dawn while her husband slept upstairs?
The Blessing of a Good Thick Skirt
She fought a crocodile with a paddle, wore leeches like a fur collar, and insisted to her dying day that trousers were beneath her — so what, exactly, did the skirt save her from?
The Chevalier Who Wouldn't Lie Down
What kind of person enters a fencing tournament against an entire garrison while their brain is swelling inside their skull?
The Man Who Sewed Up a Heart
What happens when a former barber decides to stitch a beating heart by lamplight, twelve years after the most famous surgeon on Earth said it couldn't be done?