Venice – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

The 1660 Foire de Saint-Germain

Featuring castanets, monkeys, marionettes, and human and tortoise castles.

Balthasar Nebot, The Forze D'Ercole; the Castellani acrobats in a Venetian piazza.

Hackney Brook restoration scheme

Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.

Shark jumping on Wick Road near St. Dominic's Primary School following the reinstatement of Hackney Brook.

Ben Jonson and the ground charlatans

Like today’s miserable vendors of pirated CDs, early modern Venetian ambulants are trading on someone else’s stolen content, but at least they’ve had to learn it by heart.

Assaulted by a pine processionary caterpillar!

With chunks of Dioscorides and Andrés Laguna, including the wonderful story of what happened when an impotent bridegroom and a constipated friar involuntarily swapped medicines.