Think you know your city? To become a cabbie in London you’ll need to pass the world’s toughest geography exam – memorising the city’s 20,000 streets and another 40,000 landmarks and be able to recite the shortest legal route between any two addresses within a six mile radius of Charing Cross instantly and without looking at a map. It’s called The Knowledge. The pass rate is lower than the pass rate to become a Navy Seal.
The Golden Age of Pirates played out in the first two decades of the 18th century. One of the last and most successful was Captain Bartholomew Roberts a.k.a. Black Bart – a cavalier swashbuckler and the nearest thing to a real life Jack Sparrow real life has to offer.
No question about it – Vlad Tepes was a hard man even in an era of hard men. He was also a man who made plenty of powerful enemies and at a time when the printing press made it possible to create reputations – or tear them down. Was Vlad truly as monstrous as legend has it, or was he at least partly the victim of the world’s first bad press campaign?