Oxford, the “city of dreaming spires” can lay claim to most of the great writers of English fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Dr. Seuss (American of course - did you know he went there?), but also Oscar Wilde and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia)

Nowadays, if the Internet is awash in erotic images, many of them were placed there by women, but a century ago only the leisured classes had access to such images. It is more interesting when the pornographer, back then, was a woman. What were her motives? Was it just the

Should a man lose his life over a beautiful woman? These days it's hard to comprehend the death in 1837 of Alexander Pushkin, the father of Russian literature, from a duel. Duels were illegal of course, but Pushkin, who had dueled before, took the bullet in his stomach

Do Shakespeare’s homoerotic sonnets mean he was as gay as Dumbledore? Are Rembrandt’s etchings sacriligious? It’s the private work of these two giants that arouses the most interest these days. The idea that Shakespeare was gay is based primarily on Sonnet 20 (there are others), and his

Eugène Delacroix traveled to Algeria and Morocco in 1832, where he imagined an intense eroticism in the people, their clothing, the culture and the landscapes. The irony was that none of the women, Muslim or Jewish, would take their clothes off so Delacroix had to do it for them. The

What is it with bathhouses? After the medieval era, they are almost completely absent from Western literature and art, other than in Russian literature and art perhaps, like the image above. Vladimir Mayakovsky's satirical play The Bathhouse (1930) only uses the bathhouse as a metaphor, but there is

London’s celebrity art world was rocked by controversy in 1775. The glamorous Angelica Kauffman, whose self-portrait is shown above, had arrived in London a decade earlier, shortly after Casanova’s misadventures there. Like La Charpillon, she was born in Switzerland and already had a professional career as a painter

This naked, reclining woman shown below could be Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II. Or not… Nowadays, art historians alternate between her and the King’s earlier mistress, Barbara Villiers, shown above, who had several children by the King. You be the judge. Is it the same woman? This

Aside from the mysterious death of Jesus Christ, or Rasputin perhaps, it's hard to think of another figure whose death has been so controversial or so colorful. Whether it was an accidental death from cholera, or suicide via arsenic, theories abound. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and his supposed

Sex between humans and other species obviously occurs. There’s simply too much evidence. In 2013, Scientific American stated: "DNA analyses find that early Homo sapiens mated with other human species and hint that such interbreeding played a key role in the triumph of our kind." But most

The Great Masturbator (1929) below was a gift by Salvador Dalí to the Spanish State, and it must have appealed to his sense of humor that the painting would go on display in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. At bottom (no puns intended) is Dalí

Strip away the clothes and what you find at the heart of the Holy Grail myths is sex and sexual passion. The virgin knight errant must first climb the holy mountain, cross the perilous bridge to the castle and there explore the chamber of mysteries to claim the rose and

Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most fascinating of German writers, committed suicide here on the shores of Kleiner (Little) Wannsee in 1811, near Potsdam, in what is now the distant outskirts of Berlin. He was only 34 and he was not alone. After a final picnic, the former military

Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it – Matthew 7:13-14. Is there

This Velásquez painting was the victim of a celebrated case of art vandalism in 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to it. The question is: why this picture when there were others to choose from? The Rokeby Venus, otherwise known as The Toilet of Venus or La

Possibly the nastiest painting ever produced, this is called A Grotesque Old Woman and it is attributed to Flemish Renaissance master Quintin Massys in Antwerp sometime between 1513-1530, with many favoring 1515. It served as a model for John Tenniel’s Duchess in Alice in Wonderland and the painting is

Haven't we all been there? That is Laurence Coe's Venus and Tannhauser, circa 1896, up above. Eden, Arcadia, Cockaigne, the Holy Grail legends, Utopia, Shangri-La, the Venusberg, etc.; the mystery is that no one knows where any of them are. Below is Tannhäuser in the Venusberg

Wartburg Castle is on a hill above the town of Eisenach, in the most mythic part of Germany. To the west is the Fairytale Road, associated with the Brothers Grimm, and to the north is the Brocken in the Harz Mountains, where the witches ride on Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s

The most interesting aspect of witches is that they like to have sex with the Devil, according to most experts, and the best paintings and woodcuts of these orgiastic witches are by the Renaissance Germans. There was none better than Hans Baldung Grien, whose Three Witches and Witch and Dragon,

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