Longreads

Long overshadowed by her brothers, Elisabeth has impressed Rupert Murdoch’s associates. “She has the brains of James and the heart of Lachlan,” one says. Photograph by Sofia…

Kristen Stewart – 'If you don’t have the heart to back up your looks, you are ugly.' Photograph: Theo Kingma/Rex Features After a year of unsuccessful auditions, the nine-year-old Kristen Stewart…

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she…

Jack White sits in his suite at the Dorchester with a glass of Diet Coke close at hand. In a black T-shirt and black jeans, he is dressed down, both by rock star standards and by Jack White…

Weight has always been an issue. Two years ago it all came to a head when I was thrown off a flight by Southwest Airlines for being "too fat". The airline suggested I was too big for one…

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. "The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive." He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this."

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos. All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel 'Histoire d’O,' the full truth was finally made public.