The blood eagle
Ninth-century Scandinavia has had a good press in recent years. As late as the 1950s, when Kirk Douglas filmed his notorious clunker The Vikings—a movie that featured lashings of fire…
The child murder that gave voodoo its bad name
It was a Saturday, market day in Port-au-Prince, and the chance to meet friends, gossip and shop had drawn large crowds to the Haitian capital. Sophisticated, French-educated members of the…
The octogenarian who took on the shoguns
There has always been something otherworldly about Hokkaido. It is the most northerly of the four great land masses that make up Japan, and although separated from the mainland, Honshu,…
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…
Stoney Jack and the Cheapside Hoard
It was only a small shop in an unfashionable part of London, but it had a most peculiar clientele. From Mondays to Fridays the place stayed locked, and its only…
A little bit of background: Envoi
My parting shot, in the sidebar to this blog, is a quote from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian writer and librarian: “I have always imagined Paradise…
The last secret of the H.L. Hunley
At a quarter to nine on the evening of February 17, 1864, Officer of the Deck John Crosby glanced over the side of the Federal sloop-of-war Housatonic and across the…
A little bit of background: The crucifixion of Prince Klaas
The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chance to…
The Fayum mummy portraits
She is very beautiful. Her face is flawless: long and olive skinned, the nose long too, but neat and narrow, the brows crafted, the chin just firm enough to suggest…
Queen Victoria’s £5: the strange tale of Turkish aid to Ireland during the Great Famine
The most striking thing about the ghastly blight that ruined Ireland’s potato crop in 1845 was that the harvest had seemed healthy, even robust, when it was lifted from the…
America’s first highjacking
Earnest Pletch was mad on planes and mad on flying. In itself, that was scarcely uncommon in the America of the 1930s, a dozen years after Charles Lindbergh’s solo crossing…
Blonde cargoes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea
The horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have left an ineradicable mark on history. In the course of a little more than three and a half centuries, 12.5 million prisoners…
fifth part-Plop Andrei – Provoker (Am I a revolutionary? Am I a Spy? Am I a gay? Did I work for interpol? Am I the new Nelson Mandela? Am I a Nazis? Who am I? )
No comments I’m still alive In the spring of 2014 I spent three months in Poland, in the summer of 2015 I spent two months in the Czech Republic, and…
fourth part-Plop Andrei – Provoker (Am I a revolutionary? Am I a Spy? Am I a gay? Did I work for interpol? Am I the new Nelson Mandela? Am I a Nazis? Who am I? )
comments Did I work for interpol? Any soldier involved in military conflicts is a little scared and this is normal Because only sick mental people are not afraid. Any actor…
third part-Plop Andrei – Provoker (Am I a revolutionary? Am I a Spy? Am I a gay? Did I work for interpol? Am I the new Nelson Mandela? Am I a Nazis? Who am I? )
No comments Am I a gay? The Russian embassy in Chisinau has more than a thousand employees, more employees than the presidency of the Republic of Moldova, although in the…