Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***dedicated to Larry K*** Beach’s nightmare week continues and the search for the aupair proceeds a pace.  In an attempt then to relax in these brutish hours as the Beachcombings try and put their lives back together Beach thought that he would offer up another invisible library: libraries that have only ever existed in the […]

Anyone who knows Britain will be aware of the constant references to the Second World War in the island’s political culture, particularly when  national sovereignty is at stake. Harold Wilson decried appeals to ‘the Dunkirk Spirit’: and then shamelessly used the same trick himself. And the recent spats over Britain’s use of its ‘veto’ within […]

An ‘ill’ day with interesting complications in the throat area  so Beach is going to go off topic with this  extraordinary book he recently stumbled upon: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (Peter Menzel 2005). This exercise in photo-journalism has a fair bit of manipulation behind it: but the idea itself is an extraordinarily simple […]

Beachcombing has spent rather more time than is good for him over the last year looking at cases of, what are in legal terms, child abuse. Nineteenth-century Irish families who (to use an inadequate word) ‘punished’ children because they believed that they were fairies or ‘changelings’: the real child had, the families believed, been spirited […]

Beachcombing, like many aging ideologues, can no longer bring himself to care about things that used to give his teenage self heartburn. But, there are a few exceptions – identity cards, Brussels delenda est, reptile road-crossing tunnels… – that buzz him into life. Not least among these and particularly associated in his mind with this […]

Not a month ago Beachcombing reflected on the strange way that Roman ghosts are a modern invention and the way too that there are apparently fashions in which historical periods haunt and which do not. Beach thought that today he would reflect, instead, on a different but surely related phenomenon, the apparent allergy that new […]

There have been various ‘world’ languages, beginning with Greek, moving on to Latin, and from there changing rapidly from Portuguese, to Spanish, to French and more recently to English. Beachcombing spent a lazy moment yesterday browsing a nineteenth-century essay on the ‘inevitable’ triumph of English, the author arguing that not only would English become the […]

The demography of this blog is unusual: it is about 30% history buffs, 30% anomalists/Forteans and 40% hybrid types. Beachcombing belongs very much to the first of these three and he certainly did not plan, when he started, a year and a half ago, to write for anyone but his dry-as-dust friends. He is glad, […]

A rather off-the-wall post reflecting on some of the imagery used in the last few days as the UK begins its long, hard crash out of the European Union. While little Miss B continues to play with her new rabbit and the family opens another door on their electronic advent calendar, history is being made. […]

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 Easter eggs. However, only recently a […]

A bit of non-history fluff today that has been going around and around in Beachcombing’s head: the strange compatibilities and incompatibilities of married couples from different cultures. When British Beachcombing himself happily tied the knot with his Italian wife a decade ago, he was told that married life with ‘foreigners’ was more interesting but more […]

Here follows one of those contemporary japes which may have escaped the attention of Beach’s non-British readers: excuse the lack of history, bizarreness there is though a plenty. The story so far: Johann Hari, gifted English journalist jobbing for the rather boring but worthwhile Independent has been caught taking quotations from other authors and inserting […]

Reading Kenneth Feder’s Encylopedia of Dubious Archaeology Beach was reminded of an adage by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin once said that before you start arguing with someone you need to make a fundamental decision: do you want to change that person’s opinion or do you want to draw blood? It is a frightening question because 90% […]

An email from Moonman brings the sad news that William Corliss passed away 8 July, a month and a half shy of his eighty-fifth year. Corliss, for those who don’t know, was the world’s greatest living anomalist. From 1974 to his death he collected curiosities culled from science magazines and journals. He then took these […]

Imagine a visit to the universal library: a building in which all books, manuscripts, scrolls, rolls and tablets from all civilisations and all ages have been placed next to each other on shelves running for tens and tens of miles. When Borges and others wrote about this fabulous place in generations past theirs was only […]