Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018 May 8, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
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 […]
Gaston Ouvrieu and Blindfold Driving July 30, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
A delightful end of month story. Our hero is Gaston Ouvrieu who, in 1917, received a serious injury while serving in the French army. When he woke up in hospital he was alleged to be able to read the minds of other patients, as the doctor took his pulse: Ouvrieu needed this ‘telegraph’ effect for […]
A Fairy Encounter in Nineteenth-Century Madrid September 10, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
***And so it begins… first class today: unpleasant warm fuzzy feeling in stomach, awareness that no more proper research for six months*** Beach just stumbled across this curious account of a sighting of little people in Madrid in the 1860s. The witness was a nineteenth-century spiritualist: the account begins with her own curious take on […]
