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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

"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

Who said ballet has to be boring? The most stimulating moment in ballet history surely must have been at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1912 when Nijinsky ended The Afternoon of a Faun by simulating masturbation in front of a full house. It caused a riot just as

It’s fair to say the silly debate between Art vs Pornography is now over. For all the millions of words defending or collapsing the difference, there is no Art, no Pornography. There is only art with sexual content or art without it. Not that art galleries and museums can

Could this be feminist art critics chopping off the head of a patriarch perhaps? Artemisia Gentileschi painted Judith Beheading Holofernes around 1612-13 and it has been the subject of much debate. In mid-1611, the 17-year-old Gentileschi may, or may not, have been raped by her tutor Agostino Tassi. Although Gentileschi

Well, maybe not all banned. Some of them... In some places but not others. But definitely all controversial. And then a few related controversial record album covers from when you could get away with this stuff: Higher res versions and explanations are available in Wikipedia... They are from L to

Caravaggio painted the infamous picture shown below in 1598. The following year a Roman noblewoman Beatrice Cenci was executed for her part in a lurid murder of her father, who reportedly had raped her repeatedly. Beheading was a common form of execution at the time and this painting got everyone&

Fowey in Cornwall has many literary associations going back to Joseph of Arimathea, of Holy Grail fame no less. Joseph, introduced in Luke 23, is known for burying the body of Jesus in the tomb, assisted by Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus. But there is a legend

Boucher, one of the most celebrated French painters of the 18th century, was in the eyes of his detractors (like Diderot), nothing but a pimp. He used his beautiful wife as a model and he privately indulged in erotica like the painting below, Leda and the Swan, which is only

Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality has been a matter of some controversy over the years, especially in Denmark. Many academics and journalists have claimed him as a repressed homosexual or bisexual or ambisexual, with The Little Mermaid, The Little Match Girl, The Ugly Duckling trotted out as evidence. Indeed there&

Was the Harlequin of the Commedia dell'arte originally Black? This is not a new idea. In his heyday Harlequin wore a black mask as in the picture below. Just as there is a tradition of White Face clowns (e.g. the Pierrot), there is also a tradition of

Up top is a painting that surprised me when I first saw it: how did Jean Delville get away with this L'Ecole de Platon? It may be titled "The School of Plato" but it looks like Jesus and the Disciples in coy homosexual poses. But what

Was there ever a filmmaker so drawn to literary sex? Ken Russell's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love came out in 1969 and won an Academy Award for Best Actress, but what made it interesting was the first full-frontal nude wrestling scene between two

Based in Bologna, Lavinia Fontana specialized in portraits of wealthy families and she made a good living from it. But it is the painting below that fascinates the most... It is titled Portrait of a Girl Covered in Hair or Portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus (1594-1595). Antonietta Gonzalez, the subject of

The famous German legend of the Lorelei (or Lorelay) is really not that interesting. Neither as a sexual fable nor as a tourist destination. It's just a rock (above). What is interesting is why these pilgrimage sites lure us there at all. But, with magical and sacred places,

Is mystical ecstasy really displaced sexual ecstasy like in the image above? I find it difficult to interpret medieval mystical writing any other way, especially by women mystics like Teresa of Ávila (Teresa de Jesús) and Margery Kempe, and what am I to make of Catherine of Siena's