Archive · Mores · People
Photographs taken at Maximilian Voloshin's dacha in Koktebel, Crimea, in 1911. Voloshin began living in Koktebel in 1907: his mother, Elena Ottobaldovna Kirienko-Voloshina, whom the poet and his friends called "Pra", from the word for "foremother", bought a plot of land here and
NB! · Observations · Mores · Humour
NB! · Geography · Observations · Nature
Who would have thought Lake Titicaca was quite so high! It turns out to stand at 3,812 metres above sea level. Baikal lies at an altitude of 455 metres. Lake Superior, of the American Great Lakes system, lies at 183 metres
Faith · Art · London · Monarchies · Museums
Richard II Presented to the Virgin and Child by His Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund. otherwise known as the Wilton Diptych, made of two small panels joined by hinges and painted on both sides. On the front, at left, we see the young King Richard
NB!
Aristocracy · Cinema · Books
Remembering the magnificent 1963 screen adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel "The Leopard", on the life of the aristocratic Salina family amid the political and social upheavals of the Risorgimento in Italy. Civil war is breaking out in Italy. On one side stand the republicans,
Aristocracy · Archive · Monarchies · Mores · Saint Petersburg
Interior of the study of Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya, the first Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya, in her house on the English Embankment in Saint Petersburg. Photograph of 1876. Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova (Dolgorukaya), from 1880 Most Serene Princess Yuryevskaya (1847 to 1922), was the second, morganatic, wife of Emperor Alexander II;
Books · Monarchies · Rome · Humour
What do you want? A republic? The republic was a fraud. Do you want civil wars again? Do you want famine in the streets once more? Do you want the barbarians to come knocking at your doors? You bawl yourselves hoarse in vain. Go home! Rabble! And you call yourselves
Books · Society · Humour
The Primus stove is very Troubled, Ailing with something, Dissatisfied, Though he – a Primus – is first-rate. – Ah, in my grief I'll fling myself into the stove, Dash, Fling, Topple over… Why am I only a Primus, And not a "Ford". Literal translation In the end
Architecture · Observations · New York · Society · Humour
Trump has berated the UN for pocketing several billion on renovating the very building that houses its Secretariat. One has the feeling that the embezzlement of repair funds is the most elementary corruption practice in the world, running from the endless levies at school for redecorating a classroom to, as
Architecture · Heritage · Mores
A protected zone has been established around the Mamontov dacha in the Moscow Region. The Mamontovs were the first builders of dachas along the Yaroslavl line. At the turn of the 1850s and 1860s, Mikhail Nikolayevich Mamontov built a two-storey dacha on a plot of leased land in the
Monarchies · Observations · Mores · Society
The King of Britain has met the oldest of his subjects, 116-year-old Ethel Caterham. I sometimes remark on this gesture of British rulers: attention and respect towards the elderly, with special meetings for veterans, visits to the long-lived, and congratulatory messages. Much of this exists in our