ADRIAN J BOAS

from Strappado from The Miseries and Misfortunes of War by Jacques Callot, 1633. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: from Wikimedia Commons How to...

Academics occasionally write works of fiction, but most often these works are stillborn. Their ill-fated destiny is to be forgotten in a...

After publishing my first novel, The Sulphur Priest , in 2021, a story that was very much bound up in my academic work as an...

It seems that the most splendid things are those the existence of which is most fleeting. Spring is here and already gone, and there is...

Two unexplained episodes of people vanishing stand out in the memories in my childhood. One was the disappearance of an Australian Prime...

The narrow dirt track, deeply ridged from the recent rains, passes uncultivated fields and vineyards where the twisted vines are just...

After failing in numerous attempts at opening an external drive (the tiny white light on the side lit up and flickered like a distant...

The concept of selfless love is a fine one perhaps, but how often is love genuinely selfless? How often do people do purely altruistic...

Stripped of almost all forms of embellishment, the convent church of St Anne has been recompensed for its losses, particularly in the...

Several years ago, I obtained a dried lotus flower, and through a bit of research on the internet managed to find out how to geminate the...

A large part of the appeal of archaeology lies in the fact that one never knows what one is going to uncover. It is perhaps one of the...

A large part of the appeal of archaeology lies in the fact that one never knows what one is going to uncover. It is perhaps one of the...

Recent excavations in the city of Pompeii uncovered the skeleton of a man who appeared to have been decapitated by a large stone. He was...

“All is fair in love and war” is an aphorism attributed to the sixteenth century English wit, poet and playwright, John Lyly. Basically,...

We should be very pleased that there is gravity holding us onto the world. Gravity is essential for the existence of life on the planet,...

For those interested in the subject matter of my upcoming book The Sulphur Priest, and without giving too much away and leaving the title...

Every family has its more colourful characters. In mine there is an interesting mix of the illustrious and the dubious, among them...

I have been writing this blog on crusader related topics for two and a half years, and at no time have written less than two posts a...

Poverty as an ideal is not unique to Christian monasticism. It is found in the teachings of the Stoics such as Seneca and Epictetus and...

Of the many important contributions Ronnie Ellenblum made in crusading studies, one of the most substantial is his shattering of the old...