Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

Beach has recently been thinking a lot about a crucial difference between European nations, one that is perhaps not immediately evident to outsiders, but one that divides the continent into two camps: the capacity of these countries for bold if stupid actions. Put in the most vivid terms possible if Spain or Sweden or Lithuania […]

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 repeat names endlessly: you need to distinguish one George from another, say. Beach has spent an hour looking through collections of lists of these epithets, […]

Modern Europeans tend to have mixed feelings about the rise of Islam: Islam and Christianity have, after all, been butting heads for the last fifteen hundred years. What is not normally appreciated though is the fundamental role Islam had in creating Europe. Islam, it will be remembered, was born in the Middle East in the […]