The Last Cavalry Charge in History? June 16, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryIt is a long ago Sunday and Beachcombing, aged ten, is playing with his plastic Napoleonic soldiers. In walks Beachcombing’s father with his dangerous pacifist tendencies and pointing to a group of charging cavalry observes: ‘They must have suffered terribly when their horses were shot from under […]
Unluckiest in History June 12, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ModernBeachcombing has had one of those extraordinarily bad days where everything went wrong from birdsong onwards: broken computers, screaming infants, rude emails, income tax threats, temperamental car, vomiting wife (don’t ask)… In celebration of this he thought that he would muse on the unluckiest person in history: a […]
Hitler’s Class-Mate June 10, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing has five files on Hitler and will soon have to start on a sixth. The moustached one was, after all, a whirlpool in history dragging the strange, coincidental, bizarre and outrageous into his cursed depths. A favourite curiosity is examined in Kimberley Cornish’s The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and […]
Longbow at Dunkirk June 4, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryDonald Featherstone’s The Bowmen of England was written in 1968 and read by Beachcombing 7 long years ago. He is ashamed to say though – and this reflects badly on him rather than on the author – that the only thing he can remember is […]
Oleg Penkovsky, Six Breaths and World Destruction May 31, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing has never quite known what to make of Oleg Penkovsky, the most important double agent run by MI6, indeed by any power in the Cold War. Was he self-seeking? A traitor? A hero? These are puerile questions: he was probably all three. But now for a curiosity that is more amenable to […]