Clik here to view.
The bodies in the bogs
Bog pool beneath Errigal Mountain, County Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Gareth McCormack, reproduced with permission – clicking the image takes you to Gareth’s site and more evocative landscape...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse
Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns. Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Breton Bluebeard
“Widower Bluebeard and the Red Key” – a painting from Cassia Lupo’s wonderful series “Fables and myths.” Reproduced with permission and grateful thanks. For very nearly all its course, the Blavet is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The longest prison sentences ever served: redux
Who served out the longest prison sentence known to history? My extensive investigation – begun in 2010 but now comprehensively updated – answers that question [it’s Charles Fossard, of Australia,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse
Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns. Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Queen Victoria’s £5: the strange tale of Turkish aid to Ireland during the...
A destitute Irish family search a stubble field for healthy potatoes at the height of the Great Famine of 1845-51. At least a million people–one in eight of the population–starved to death during the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse
Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns. Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The last secret of the H.L. Hunley
James R. McClintock, the inventor of the H.L. Hunley, shortly before journeying to Boston in February 1879–apparently to meet his end there. Image: Naval Historical Center. At a quarter to nine on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stoney Jack and the Cheapside Hoard
Maverick archaeologist George Fabian Lawrence– better known as Stoney Jack, the navvies’ friend. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Only without Nazis. And in Wandsworth. It was only a small shop in an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse
Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, a keen fox-hunter who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The blood eagle
Vikings as portrayed in a 19th-century source: fearsome warriors and sea raiders. Things not to do when you travel in time. No.238: don’t kill a Viking, then let yourself get captured by his vengeful...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The secret plot to rescue Napoleon by submarine
Tom Johnson, the famous smuggler, adventurer, and inventor of submarines, sketched in 1834 for the publication of Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt. Napoleon Bonaparte caused so much damage –...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“My little soldier”
The funeral of James Idle in the village of Hullavington, on August 29, 1914. Picture the British countryside and the chances are that you are picturing the unmatched beauty of the Cotswolds, in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The crucifixion of Prince Klaas: Antigua’s disputed slave rebellion of 1736
Prince Klaas, leader of the supposed slave rebellion on Antigua, on the wheel. Not every slave shipped to the New World from Africa ended up in the Deep South of the United States. In fact, well over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fishmonger’s Hall: How William Crockford beggared the British aristocracy
William Crockford—identified here as “Crockford the Shark”—sketched by the great British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson in about 1825. Rowlandson, himself an inveterate gambler who blew his way...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The worst job there has ever been
Life in a nineteenth century city could be blissful… if you were one of the Victorian era’s 1%. For the great majority, though, it involved little that would be familiar to readers of Austin, Trollope...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Run out of town on an ass: how Queen Victoria (allegedly) struck Bolivia off...
To be one of Queen Victoria’s ambassadors in the middle of the 19th century, when British power was at its height, was to be something close to a king—in parts of the world, close to a god. Backed by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Closing the Pigeon Gap
At midnight on November 12, 1870, two French balloons, inflated with highly flammable coal gas and manned by desperate volunteers, took off from a site in Monmartre, the highest point in Paris. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On heroic self-sacrifice
No nation is short of monuments to its heroes. From the Lincoln Memorial and Nelson’s Column to the infamous gold-plated statue of Turkmenbashi—which until its recent demolition sat atop a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world
Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a...
View Article
![ONEW – KAKERA -Unmei no Piece- – EP [iTunes Plus M4A]](http://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music221/v4/d0/fb/86/d0fb86a5-ba60-4bea-41fb-7f54c125f518/VEATP-45908.jpg/296x296bb.webp)
