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Category / Time travel

The Great Binge: An Unsettling Reality Check of the Drug-Fuelled “Belle Epoque”

Curiously absent from our historical timelines is “The Great Binge”, a more recently-coined but arguably more appropriate term for that famous period at the turn of the century which we typically refer to as the “Belle Epoque” or the “Gilded Age”. This wasn’t just a time when culture and industry flourished however, it was also…

Forget Versailles, Tune into the Forgotten Château that Became France’s Abbey Road

Imagine the sweet sound of a duet between Elton John and Frédéric Chopin, or a Van Gogh painting interpreted in song by David Bowie. What if the lyrics for a Fleetwood Mac verse or a Pink Floyd anthem were ghost written by the famed 19th century female novelist George Sand? There’s only one place that…

The Tour de France is a Beautiful Mess and Maybe that’s How it Should Be

For a long time, I didn’t really “get” the appeal of the Tour de France. A bunch of men in spandex torturing themselves on two wheels, each producing enough sweat to flush a toilet 39 times? (That was one of the more unusual statistics I found floating around out there). And how does anyone take…

I Went to Rome’s Last Surviving Adult Theatre So You Don’t Have To

The Romans are famous for a lot of things – building and conquering empires, trade, art, food – and don’t forget sex! Pompeii was excavated at the end of the 19th century and the archeologists who uncovered the city found themselves surrounded by erotic images at every turn. For more than a hundred years, there…

The Secret Menu of McDonald’s Supersized Failures, from McTrains to McPlanes & Beyond

It’s time for a little gratuitous and greasy fast food nostalgia. Lovin’ it or hatin’ it, McDonald’s is a permanent fixture of the modern high street, but the nineties were a particularly experimental era for the multinational corporation. Ronald & co were poised to push the boundaries of what a fast-food chain could achieve and…

From Corsets to Culottes: The Women who Dared to Change Wimbledon

Wimbledon today is known for showcasing the tennis talents of both male and female competitors, but in the tournament’s earlier days, one does wonder how women were expected to make a decent serve dressed in full-length skirts, corsets, and fiddly blouses: the ‘tennis whites’ of the time. It took some real champions to make a…

Long-lost Erotica of a Pre-Freudian Sexologist

Forget Freud. Today, we’re snooping around the personal archives of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a 19th century psychoanalyst and sexologist extraordinaire who history has often been forgotten despite his groundbreaking research in sexual pathology. His chef d’oeuvre is undoubtedly Psychopathia Sexualis, the book that made jaws drop across Europe in 1886 and the first-ever scientific study on sexual…

Rediscover the Fine Arts Retro Aesthetic of the Babysitters Club

Remember The Baby-Sitters Club? If you grew up in the nineties, had a perm or a crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas, you definitely swapped copies with your friends. The series, which details the lives of a group of pre-teens living and babysitting in suburban Connecticut was created by Ann M. Martin, although the majority of…

All Aboard the Doomed Art Deco Floating Palace

Seventy-five years after she lay burning and capsized in the New York harbour, the French SS Normandie still holds the record as the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built. She is considered one of the greatest of ocean liners in history, a floating palace of Art Deco majesty so dazzling, they nicknamed her the “Ship of Light” similar…

Bridgerton’s Black Presence isn’t Total Fantasy, it’s Hidden History

There’s a reason why Google autofills questions about the authenticity of Black presence in 17th and 18th century Europe – lots of people are asking. The hit Netflix show Bridgerton is Shonda Rimes’ first historical drama, but anyone who enjoys the screenwriter’s work (be it Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal and many more), knows that…

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