Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The story so far. An ancient British myth going back to ‘ye olde Celtic times’ states that while ravens reside at the Tower of London then Britain will prosper. However, turn the neatly embossed tourist sign with ‘ye olde Celtic times’ over and there is a ‘Made in Taiwan’ marker stamped into the plastic. Translated? [...]

                  Beach hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the Italian Renaissance this past week: blame the genitals of the mad, bad but always interesting Caterina Sforza. And in this difficult time of renaissance obsession one source that has run around and around his head is (Lauro [...]

***This post is dedicated to Ricardo*** Beach has noted before in this place the extraordinary world of digital books which has opened up in the last few years. He has argued fiercely (though it is certainly a lost battle) that Google are villains and that www.archive.org should be showered with Nobel peace prizes and chocolate [...]

Caterina Sforza was one of those extraordinary individuals who managed to pack five or six lifetimes into her forty odd years. Wife, alchemist, mother, warrior, seductress, torturer, hunter, general, rape victim and, don’t forget, the model for one of the three graces in Botticelli’s Primavera: she also had a lot of hot Milanese blood swilling [...]

***BTW we’ve set up a twitter account under DrBeachcombing, though still understand nothing*** Beach had an emotional day today rummaging through screeds of old crap in cardboard boxes. In one of these he found a strange rectangular object that our ancestors called a ‘floppy disc’. And, after much trial and error, he also found a [...]

***This post is dedicated to Invisible who first worried over the connection*** Like, to use an Old Testament image, a dog returning to its vomit, Beach is sidling back to a problem from several months ago. The following reference appears in Waldron’s Description of the Isle of Man and what confuses Beachcombing is the final [...]