Big topics in ten-minute chapters.

Americans usually meet the fall of Rome as a warning: decadence, Christianity, lead in the water, barbarians at the gates, a crowd living on free bread. Few of these explanations survive a close look at the dates.

Most readers picture the witch hunts as one frenzy, the same everywhere. The court records tell a different story: an accused witch’s fate depended less on the charge than on where she was tried, under what procedure, and whether a higher court was watching.

In 1817, a former official of the Spanish Inquisition put the number of people it had burned at 31,912. Writers copied the figure for a century and a half.

You can read English well and still get lost when a plumber on a London bus says it’s “chucking it down” or a Manchester builder tells his gran that a pigeon has “nicked” his “butty.” These stories are written for intermediate learners (around B1) and set in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.

Americans grow up with a few Benjamin Franklin scenes: the kite struck by lightning, the first streetlamps, the clocks pushed forward each spring. Each began with something real, and each grew in the retelling.