Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

As regular readers will know Beachcombing went a little fairy mad this summer. Indeed, as we speak two academic articles have been accepted for publication and four more are still waiting the judgement of tetchy referees spread out from Edinburgh to the Pacific Coast. In the process of writing these articles he read most twentieth-century […]

A crisis of sorts tonight in the Beachcombing household. Mrs B is leaving the family home to go and organise an academic conference in the heart of darkness (aka Brussels). This means that Beach – a better husband than a father – and the Beachcombing’s au pair are being left on their own to look […]

Beachcombing has been letting his dark side take charge this Saturday evening, while Mrs B. gets ready for mass, reviewing some of the fascinating Victorian literature on the thugs. The thugs, for the uninitiated, were, of course, the Indian sect whose members, in secret, and often without knowledge of their families, murdered travellers. They would […]

   Beach has a longstanding thing about elephants (see many previous posts and many posts to come) and has been wondering recently about opening up a second front on the rhinoceros: a distant reading of a text about Romans importing this beast for their games has been jumping up and down in his head. He […]

It has been a while since Beachcombing visited an immortal meal, one of those dinners past where the great ate and history crackled in the air. Still suffering from the Italian Renaissance bug and given that this is, after all, the season of the chestnut he thought that he would today lift the veil on […]

Today’s post represents a definite minority interest: poems being started by someone and finished by someone else in the Second World War. (Sorry).  Take the extraordinary exchange between the German general Heinrich Kreipe (obit 1976) and a young British major Patrick Leigh Fermor (obit 2011) [pictured centre and right] late one night in Crete in […]

Beach has now spent a year looking at legends and stories about early pre-Wrightian fliers. Essentially they fall into three categories. The Tower Jumpers, 3000 BC to 1500 AD: lunatics who jumped from heights, hoped for the best and typically died. The Renaissance Gliders, 1500-1800 AD: men who sketched out flying contraptions but for the […]

Fraternal greetings to historians, archaeologists, anomalists and bizarrists! First of all an apology is due: Beachcombing fell behind on correspondence in October. He enters the second half of the term contrite and determined to do better. Of the posts in the past month Cocaine and Ancient Egypt drummed up the most visitors, though surprisingly little […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 computer that was primitive enough to read it, while, it is true, grumbling […]

  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 reference to eggs Some people who lived near the coast, having […]

Another episode in early failed or imaginary flying exploits. The following extracts are from the letters of Marin Mersenne (obit 1648) and were translated (frustratingly Beach doesn’t have the originals to hand) by Hart [132-133]. Enjoy these rumours from Paris from around the middle of the seventeenth century. Here they are talking about a man […]