For Sale: The Lost Island Kingdom of a 1920s Bad Girl
“I ran a country”, boasted the tattooed, cigar-smoking, openly gay It-girl of the 1920s, whose life…
Category Obscure history
The Postman Who Built a Palace Made of Pebbles
This is the story of a French postman who spent thirty years of his life…
So What’s the Deal with Those Quakertown Pyramids?
We just love it when two utterly opposite worlds collide, which is precisely the case…
From Elizabeth Taylor to Adolph Hitler, Presenting History’s Greatest Decoys
First things first, we’re about to spill the contents of a very mixed bag of…
Midnight Movie of the Month: A Forgotten “Rocky Horror” Sister Film
What’s your favourite midnight movie? That one totally weird film you tell your friends about…
Paris Has a Brutal(ist) Side
Love it or hate it, brutalist architecture has an unavoidable presence in every major metropolis–…
Dinner at the Drive-Through Eiffel Tower
We’ve seen it dressed up every which way; painted yellow, used as a giant advertising…
The Towns That Were Moved by Horses
They say “it takes a village,” but if it was 1920-something, it took a horse–…
Mods vs Rockers in Brighton’s Battle of the Beach Chairs, 1964
One of my favourite things to come across when I’m researching is a snapshot from history that I’m…
Princess Bonaparte’s Orgasmic Quest
Every family has its black sheep. For the Bonaparte clan, it was Napoleon’s great grandniece,…
Whatever You Do, Don’t Tell the French About Tarrare
(A word of caution: this is not an article to read on your lunchbreak). He…
The UNESCO Treasure Made of Living Humans
Behold Catalonia’s best collective party trick: assembling hundreds of supple Spaniards into a giant tower,…