Hunting with Cheetahs: 2

What fun I’ve been having at the Met! Amidst all the glamorous masterpieces, I was very pleased to see a tiny moulded horseman – with a hunting cheetah on his horse’s bottom. Old hands on my old blog will surely remember a clip I included in Hunting with Cheetahs (1) from a 1939 film ‘Life …

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Crime and punishment: Safavid-style

Pincon wrote of the inhumanity and cruelty of Shah Abbas to his subjects, of how he “cut off their heads for the slightest offence, having them stoned, quartered, flayed alive and given alive to the dogs, or to the forty Anthropophagi and man-eaters that he always has by him”. But Chardin, who not only spent …

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