On a recent day off, we decided (against all sane advice) to watch the indie movie Savage Grace. It stars Julianne Moore as Barbara Baekeland, the wealthy wife of the Bakelite plastics heir and demented mother of Tony Baekeland (Eddie Redmayne), who later murdered her because she was constantly trying to turn him straight. Got all that? No, seriously, this ...

At precisely five minutes before high noon on March 6, 1970, the emergent radical-fringe bombers the Weather Underground had a terrifying and lethal showdown with its own cackhandedness. In a townhouse on leafy, prosperous West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, close by houses once occupied by Poe, Melville and Whitman, there was, at 11.55am, a series of horrifying explosions ...