Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…description; indeed, for me it was often beyond comprehension. But in the initial segment it deals with the experiences of Allied pilots who have flown combat missions over Europe in…

Beachcombing’s fairy year continues. In his grazing through the accounts of the fairy faith on the western and northern fringe of Europe one of the things that has most fascinated…

…in Western Europe. Altogether, this was a reading project of about ten years. Very few inaccuracies have come out in reviews and so Judt and his post-grads were probably well…

The strangest painting technique ever employed? The Mountain Man of Fan-Yang, an artist from T’ang China perhaps holds the prize in what for Europe would have been the early Middle…

…Another group that took Crimea as their home were the Goths, the Germanic tribe who radiated out of central Europe in the third, fourth and fifth centuries. That the Goths…

There is a long tradition in Europe of giving kings, queens and even aristocrats epithets: e.g. Catherine the Great, Louis the Pious… Of course, epithets make particular sense when dynasties…

…given society that they have been recorded in sacred and incidental accounts throughout history. However, there is one curious feature that emerges again and again from Meso-America to Europe and…

…not be surprised. Perhaps Europe’s one really convincing city, ten million and counting and until recently capital of a world empire, ‘the old smoke’ has a lot of interesting historical…

…erotic book plates from the private collections of Europe and publish them in a single volume. Beach has avoided here the cover and all but two of the erotic book…

…Europe, where the arbiters of taste would have loved to have colour-coded all society. This was the same cookie-cutter mentality that put merchants in red died gowns and pinned yellow…

…and he would read the letter (235). Let’s be clear. This is not a case of a New England Indian ending up in ancient Europe. Nor is it even Romans…

…Someone in Norway (or elsewhere) had noticed that there are certain parallels between Hitler and Napoleon’s career. These are, remember, two world destroyers who wreck Europe, so that this is…

…States for a year: a rather smaller version than the US we know today. He later travelled through Europe, managing a particularly stimulating and dangerous version of the grand tour….

…sense of reciprocated fascination with each other. Three examples from Europe: Ireland and Germany; France and Poland; Italy and Britain. All these pairings include an unusual amount of shared interest…

Thunderstones are a well known European and, indeed, international phenomenon, flint arrowheads or stone axes which were believed, by our early modern ancestors, to have descended from the sky in…