Unluckiest in History June 12, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
Beachcombing has had one of those extraordinarily bad days where everything went wrong from birdsong onwards: broken computers, screaming infants, rude emails, income tax threats, temperamental car, vomiting wife (don’t ask)… In celebration of this he thought that he would muse on the unluckiest person in history: a […]
Hitler’s Class-Mate June 10, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
Beachcombing has five files on Hitler and will soon have to start on a sixth. The moustached one was, after all, a whirlpool in history dragging the strange, coincidental, bizarre and outrageous into his cursed depths. A favourite curiosity is examined in Kimberley Cornish’s The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and […]
Longbow at Dunkirk June 4, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
Donald Featherstone’s The Bowmen of England was written in 1968 and read by Beachcombing 7 long years ago. He is ashamed to say though – and this reflects badly on him rather than on the author – that the only thing he can remember is […]
Oleg Penkovsky, Six Breaths and World Destruction May 31, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
Beachcombing has never quite known what to make of Oleg Penkovsky, the most important double agent run by MI6, indeed by any power in the Cold War. Was he self-seeking? A traitor? A hero? These are puerile questions: he was probably all three. But now for a curiosity that is more amenable to […]
Tibetan soldiers in the Second World War May 31, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
Beachcombing has long been intrigued by the following account published in Tribune in October 1944 in Orwell’s As I Please. We know that Greenlanders fought the Germans, that Brazilians attempted to take Monte Cassino… but Tibetans in the Wehrmacht? The mind boggles. Is it genuine or […]
