Simon Bolivar Meets Ferdinand at Sport October 13, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Simon Bolivar was a Venezuelan troublemaker who would lead the Spanish Americas to freedom. Ferdinand VII was the cretinous Spanish monarch who would allow this to happen. What Beach had not known until recently was that Bolivar and Ferdinand actually met as boys in 1800 in extraordinary circumstances. Bolivar (right) was seventeen; Ferdinand (left) was sixteen. […]
Most Interesting Eighteenth-Century Life: Francisco de Miranda September 11, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
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 […]
The Duke, His Brother and the Locomotive December 9, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
Great story, recently found, relating to the Spanish Civil War, presumably 1938. The narrator, of Jewish descent, has fled anschluss and arrived in Paris, en route to more permanent exile in the UK. I had run into Duke Dantin when he was a refugee in Paris, during the Spanish Civil War, he had fled from […]
