Falling in Love with a Seventeen-Year-Old Revolutionary
Marina Ginesta was seventeen when, in 1936, the picture above was taken by Hans Gutmann on top of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War was now underway and Marina, from a French family...
View ArticleA Monkey in the Late Roman Army
Do you remember the ape buried in Iron Age Ireland? Well, here is a cousin, who also travelled far from home. In 2001 a monkey, a macaque, in fact, was dug up at Iulia Libica (Llívia), a late Roman...
View ArticleGreen Children of Woolpit 5: Parallels
Beach must start with apologies. He promised four posts on the green children but he was not able to contain himself. Here, then, is a fifth dreamt up in the outer rings of fever in the last couple of...
View ArticleDeath by Joke
The historical practical joke tag has now reached almost a dozen posts and Beach thought that he would celebrate with a brief survey of a particularly unusual form of practical joke: jokes that ended...
View ArticleThe 5 Greatest Historical Graphic Novels
Graphic novels must be, surely, the most underestimated genre in the modern arts: perhaps about 40% of the adult population have such strong feelings that, with the exception of Charlie Brown, they...
View ArticleHorse God in Early Modern Cornwall!
In 1595 a Spanish raid on Cornwall in South-western England took place under Captain Carlos de Amezola. Amezola landed his men at Mount’s Bay and burnt several ships, churches and hundreds of houses in...
View ArticleWhen Spain Was Nigeria: the Origin of the Email Scam
Here is an early instance of the 419 scam. Was Spain nineteenth-century Nigeria? For some months a number of persons in several parts of Europe have had letters addressed to them in French, in Spanish,...
View ArticleImmortal Meals #24: Jaén’s Eggfight
Jaén in Andalucia (Spain) is a town with its roots in Spain’s troubled late middle ages, half Arab, half Christian. Jaén also stars in a wonderful book by one of our greatest living medievalists...
View ArticleIberian Hedgehog Graves
Aristotle writes in his Politics (7, 2) that ‘among the Iberians, a warring people, they fix obeliskoi in the earth around a man’s grave corresponding to the number that they have killed’. This is a...
View ArticleArab Embassy to Dark Age Scandinavia
The Vikings were attacking everyone in the ninth-century and this included the Arabs of southern Spain. After their most famous raid, in 844, when Seville was memorably captured by those northern...
View ArticleSimon Bolivar Meets Ferdinand at Sport
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...
View ArticleRedhead the Lost Spaniard
Get ready a human flotsam and jetsam story. A few months ago Beach introduced the Itza, the last independent Indian state in the Americas. The Itzas held out against the Spanish in Guatemala until...
View ArticleDumb Duels #6: Spanish Duel
Beach lived for three glorious years in Spain and there is something very Hispanic about the following Spanish duel. Honour, pain and everyone taking themselves a little too seriously. Two officers...
View ArticleGaston Ouvrieu and Blindfold Driving
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...
View ArticleVictorian Urban Legends: The Spanish Mayor
This story comes from a Spanish correspondent to a Victorian newspaper. This then, if as Beach suspects it is, an urban legend is a Spanish urban legend: note that it is a very old story, versions can...
View ArticleIron Key to a Lost World
Leaving Spain In 1492 Spain’s Jews were given an awful choice. They were, by royal fiat, to convert to Christianity or they would be kicked out of the country. The majority half-halfheartedly took on...
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