Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

It would be futile to discuss which historical man or woman had the most interesting life: what, after all, is ‘interesting’? However, if we think of places visited and people met, then a good candidate is surely Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), South American patriot, playboy, soldier, sexual athlete and general n’er-do-well. Consider, just as a […]

Beach has previously looked at tall Arab tales about trees, including the mythical children tree. However, what about this pleasing nonsense associated with Britain and Ireland? The source is Rashid al-Din and we are in the fourteenth-century. Opposite [Spain] in the midst of the Encircling Ocean are two islands, of which one is Ireland. From […]

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy Always been curious about Attica, looking forward to getting this.

German musicians in the UK early 1800s

One of the most interesting myths to come out of First World War Britain was the tall tale of the Russian soldiers with ‘snow on their boots’. The story, which emerged as the war began in Aug and Sep 1914, was that thousands of Russian soldiers had been rushed to the UK. They were there […]

I can feel the granite

The year is 1908. You are walking through a jungle territory in southeastern Cameroon in central Africa when you hear the sickening smack of the machete on flesh. Expecting the worst you emerge, your rifle half lifted, but see only a local hunter with a kill. He has taken a chimp in a trap and […]

The bull at the window is a dobbie or Cumbrian ghost

1923 KKK get together

Beach has recently been reading around medieval and early modern prostitutes. Of course, contemporary sources are not particularly vivid in this respect. Between canon law and town legislation, we either get an hysterical appeal to the coldest parts of the Gospels, or pounds, pennies and halfpence. In fact, if you want to relive the medieval […]

Magnificent Roman jug

There are two interesting references in Helter Skelter (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry), the description of the Charles Manson murders, to a bottomless pit in the Californian desert. First, a little background for anyone coming to this new. Charles Manson was a charismatic and unpleasant individual (a promising combination) who gathered a group of impressionable […]

Love the beard…

A nice story about intuition and intelligence work. Aldrich Ames was a CIA operative and a schmuck. Starting in 1985 through 1993, when he was finally arrested, Ames gave Russian intelligence information in exchange for bags of cash. In short, a number of assets were executed and imprisoned in the Soviet Union so Ames could […]

Beach read and watched a lot of zombie fiction this last summer. There was the Living Dead, the nightmarish Crossed and Alan Moore’s incredible adaptation, not to mention 28 Days Later. Beach is not an out and out zombie fan. In fact, he finds zombies, per se, the least interesting of all our supernatural fauna. (If Beach was […]