Two Miles High

Alice's Mirrors

Do Places of Execution have Ghosts?

Today, it is hard to imagine any ghosts hanging around Tyburn, but for centuries, this spot by Marble Arch is where London executed more than 50,000 people. These were public executions. The last man to be hanged there was a highwayman, in 1783. But, all you can see today

Kama Sutra

Some Like It Hot: spicy foods and sex

Is spicy food an aphrodisiac? According to gossip columns, eating spicy foods releases endorphins and dopamine, boosts antivirals and antioxidants and testosterone in men and leads to more sex. Health pages tout hot sauces and chili, garlic and onions and ginger, oysters, olives and olive oil, bananas, carrots….. to balance

The Town Square

Berlin

The Tauentzienstrasse beyond was like an avenue of shattered monuments. Through wide gaps between formless mounds of rubble, you got views over the great central desert of destruction, and saw the Sieges Saeule rising forlornly from the treeless, snow-covered plain of the Tiergarten, which was dotted with bizarre remnants of

Life as Opera

Opera Queens

How gay is opera? This idea is less interesting than the idea that gay culture has always loved the flamboyance of music hall, opera, musicals and certain contemporary female pop stars. In the late 19th century, and into the 20th, it was common for wealthy gay men and women to

Alice's Mirrors

Where is this?

Scroll down for the answers. #1: A country with lots of old castle ruins like this one. #2 Boar Lane once had this city's finest and most fashionable shops. #3 Salt pans in the distance. #4 Harvest time, late 19th century... #5 Cable car system #6 Which Asian

Vampires in Venice

Statues of George Sand

There are many statues of George Sand. This is is the most famous one: it can be found in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. It was designed by François-Léon Sicard and installed in 1904 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth. I like this statue. Below is a different

Vampires in Venice

The Grand Tour

In December of 1833, George Sand and Alfred de Musset escaped from Paris, abandoning her daughter Solange to the servants, and traveled to Italy. Was it a honeymoon or their version of the Grand Tour? They'd never been. From the 17th century onwards, the Grand Tour was an

Alice's Mirrors

The 'Golden Legend'

What if, in medieval times, there was a book that defended young women from being forced into unwanted marriages? Nowadays, this idea generates some fascinating collisions in contemporary feminist and religious writing. More on this in a minute.  Legenda aurea was the most widely read religious work of the Late

Women in Trousers

Boccaccio’s 'Decameron' - Day 3

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was written between 1348 and 1352 and it is large! A hundred stories told over 10 days by a group of young aristocrats (three men and seven women) who have fled Florence to avoid the Black Death. When some of today’s literary critics and academics

Women in Trousers

Who was Saint Pelagia?

The Pope Joan legend may owe something to the Pelagia legends. Pelagia was a female Christian saint in the 4th or 5th century, but there are different versions. Wikipedia focuses on the Pelagia who was an ascetic monk, who wasted away living on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Upon

Life as Opera

Ruritanian romances

This minor literary genre has a lengthy Wikipedia description! When I was young, I enjoyed Anthony Hope’s seminal The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), but these stories seem like nostalgic nonsense these days. They are usually set in the Balkans or Eastern Europe in fictional countries like “Ruritania” and they

Women in Trousers

The Female Husband

This was once a thing. Women who lived as men and “married” other women. As far as I know, it’s not really the case anymore in Western countries in that, now, no one needs to actively deceive anybody else in this way. There were many heterosexual couples up until

Poison Pen Letters

My top 8 detective fiction writers

I read a lot of detective fiction. It's armchair traveling and so the setting matters as much as the characters and the plot. These are my favorite 8 writers: Georges Simenon - prolific Belgian writer famous for his Paris Commissaire Jules Maigret. I was first drawn in by

Alice's Mirrors

Scent in Art

Imagine you are in charge of an art exhibition and many of the paintings show flowers. Perhaps a woman is sniffing them; it's a pre-Raphaelite painting. How would you make this more appealing to general audiences? You might consider having flowery scents wafting through the gallery. Personally, I

Alice's Mirrors

The Perils of Too Much Food

Food and drink appear constantly in art and literature, as well as in film and television, but what about the perils of too much of a good thing? Over-eating, obesity, gout... No artist has better rendered it than the prolific Londoner James Gillray, who died in 1815. Below is George,

Alice's Mirrors

Venice in art and literature

Venice is for me the city of Canaletto. For others, in literature and painting, Venice is a metaphor of death and the transience of life. Wagner died here in 1883 in the arms of his wife Cosima. Sergei Diaghilev, Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky are all buried on the Isola

Alice's Mirrors

Rumi

The best-selling poet in America today, many say, is… er, a Muslim.  Not Whitman or Dickinson or Frost, but Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet and theologian, who lived most of his life in Konya, now Central Turkey.  But the versions that sell so well bear little resemblance to the

Alice's Mirrors

Louveciennes and Le Vésinet

Louveciennes, on the south side of the Seine, and Le Vésinet, on the north side are now absorbed into the western suburbs of Paris. Once the railway line from Paris to St. Germain-en-Laye opened in 1848, painters, musicians, writers and dancers soon followed it out there, some of them to

Alice's Mirrors

Montreux and Vevey

Montreux at the eastern end of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman) these days is a tourist city associated with both pop culture and High Culture and, over the years, celebrities too many to mention. For pop culture, there is a statue of Queen’s Freddie Mercury staring out over the lake

Alice's Mirrors

Montmartre

Montmartre, literally "mountain of the martyr," where Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, was beheaded around 250 AD. Not to be outdone, Denis picked up his head and walked to the top of the hill, preaching a sermon as he went. In his honor the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur was

Alice's Mirrors

Starnberg

"Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour." - T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922: King Ludwig II of Bavaria was drowned

How to Look at a Naked Lady

Italo Calvino

My favorite Italo Calvino story, relating to Lady Godiva of course, is Mr. Palomar (1983), including this moment in an encounter on a nudist beach. "Returning from his stroll, Palomar again passes that bather, and this time he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, so that his gaze touches

The Town Square

The Town Square

Marco Polo enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one

The Town Square

Constantinople

What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores. A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. John Buchan Greenmantle (1916) For

The Town Square

Venice

Childe Harold: "In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone – but Beauty still is here." Lord Byron's Childe Harold'