We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable lessons, but these Cautionary Tal
Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fal
Why were soldiers on horseback told to ride straight into a valley full of enemy cannon? The disastr
The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia - and wouldn't listen to his p
Family doctor Harold Shipman got away with murdering his patients for decades. He was one of the mos
"The Pope" was a revered Dutch art expert - and yet he fell for a not very convincing forgery of a "
Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero o
One speechmaker inspired millions with his words, the other utterly destroyed his own multi-million-
We're no stranger to stories about misinformation or deliberate disinformation. We live in a world w
Cautionary Tales' host Tim Harford has a new book - The Data Detective - setting out ten commandment
It's easy to mock statistics or cast doubt on them... but we do so at our peril. Undermining our tru
The eradication of smallpox is one of humanity's great achievements - but the battle against the vir
For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable - but when a hurricane came close to de
It looked like any ordinary roll of cloth, but it brought the dreaded plague to the village of Eyam.
Clive had a deadly form of cancer, but fortunately there was a new drug to treat it. Imagine his ang
A monstrous wave and then a nuclear disaster forced Mikio and Hamako Watanabe from their home. But b
Flames are spreading through a Cincinnati hotel. The staff know it, the fire department is coming, a
In this special episode of Cautionary Tales, we feature Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford's TED Talk
We may mock our ancestors for seeking the advice of oracles, soothsayers and psychics, but today we
It was the biggest concert of Keith Jarrett's career - but the pianist was in for a shock when he en
In 1917, a brilliant British officer developed a way to use an emerging military technology: the tan
