NB! · Art · Education · Society · Humour
Alexandr Radayev
NB! · Museums · Heritage · Saint Petersburg
Mirror with a bullet mark in a Hermitage interior
A bullet mark in the mirror. The Hermitage
Faith · Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg
Rembrandt painting from the Duke de Caderousse collection acquired by Prince Golitsyn
The Return of the Prodigal Son: one of Rembrandt's last paintings, one of the chief masterpieces of the Hermitage and one of the greatest canvases in human history. The painting is most often dated to 1666-1669. But since very little is known about the last years of
Archive · Mores · People · Humour
Secret Order No. 3 to First Secretary Comrade Stalin from his eleven-year-old daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, 20 May 1937:
I order you to go to the cinema together with Comrades Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Vasya and me. (Be sure to go to the cinema today). Below is Stalin's endorsement: "I obey with pleasure. I. Stalin"
NB! · Archive · Art · London · Museums
The Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum, 1885
Books · Education · Humour
When the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy was invited to Cambridge in the 1920s to give public lectures, he devoted his course to Byron, which displeased the students: Byron had long gone out of fashion and was considered not worth discussing at…
MacCarthy was not prepared to change his subject and defended Byron in every way he could, but, seeing the audience's displeasure, he made a concession and invited anyone who wished to come to him in the evenings, after the lectures on Byron, for a conversation about talented young
Archive · Books · Ethnography
Please Meet Kozyavka
A story about a Jewish boy from a Crimean kolkhoz. Chizh magazine, issue 6, 1939. The boy, in case you were wondering, was called Elya. And Kozyavka is a small ginger cow.
NB! · Faith · Art
The Golden Halo of the Virgin in Piero della Francesca's Polyptych of Saint Anthony
Piero della Francesca, Polyptych of Saint Anthony. The Virgin's halo, a single plate of solid gold in which her head is reflected
Aristocracy · London · Mores · Society
Banker Thomas Coutts, his marriage to the actress Harriot Mellon, and Coutts Bank today
Thomas Coutts, aged 80, head of Coutts Bank in the late eighteenth century, with his second wife, the 37-year-old actress Harriot Mellon. They married in 1815, and the old man lived for another 7 years. After his death, Lady Harriot married the future Duke of St Albans, who
NB! · Archive · Architecture
Long Exposure, Florence, Piazza della Libertà, 1880
Aristocracy · Archive · In the Press · Monarchies
Calculation of Nicholas II's share of Russian blood published under the name of Alexey Suvorin
The Moscow Romanovs took their wives from Russian noble families, and their blood was purely Russian blood. But from Peter the Great onwards it became the custom to marry the heirs to the throne to foreigners, chiefly Germans, and the Russian ruling dynasty turned into a thoroughbred non-Russian one.
NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Society · People