Silvester Paradox meets Mr Macbeth

This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…

Why I like nineteenth century historical writing

Here’s Samuel Griswold Goodrich on Europe after the Goths in A History of All Nations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time (1856): When the wind had dispersed the dust of these countless armies; when the smoke of these blazing cities had ascended to the sky; when the vapors, arising from these murderous battlefields,…

Are all Slovenian bears crazy?

I imagine news of the Slovenian bear that has gone urseshit in greater Germany will do nothing to calm the nerves of Pyreneans re Slovenian bear releases here. Do remind me to send you a copy of that rivers of sheep immigration speech I made a while ago.

One of those mornings

The Auk: Quarterly Journal of Ornithology (1876): “At 6.09 am the female went on the nest, while the male continued to sing loudly from his perch, making no move to escort her on.”