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.

Painting detail: the head of the Virgin in a sheer veil with lowered eyes, and a flat golden disc halo above her.

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

The text of the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne of the Russian state on 2 March 1917, and the de facto abdication of Mikhail, who is prepared to accept power only if the people vote for it

Monarchies · Heritage · Humour

Regalia of King Otto I of Greece, lost after 1981, found in 2023

Greece's royal regalia, long thought lost, found in the royal palace at Tatoi during an inventory. The crown, sceptre and sword were made for the coronation of Greece's first king, Otto I, in 1832. Owing to a delay, the jewels were not used at the ceremony

Antique leather armchair on a metal frame with wheels and two side cranks with wooden knobs.

Museums · Paris

Wheeled armchair driven by hand cranks at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris

Wheelchair, 1720s, France. Propelled by turning the handles. Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris

Head of a dog looking upward over a dark brown slope against an ochre, textured background.

Art · Madrid · Museums

Painting of a dog by Francisco Goya, created between 1821 and 1823

The Dog. Francisco Goya, 1821-1823

Observations · Science · People

Stephen Hawking bequeathed that the black hole entropy formula that made him famous be inscribed on his gravestone, just as on the tombstone of Ludwig Boltzmann, the Austrian physicist and one of the fathers of statistical mechanics, there was carved as a

Boltzmann's contribution to the laws of classical thermodynamics was so substantial, and so revolutionary for physics and engineering, that it was even proposed to call the nineteenth century the century of Boltzmann. He modestly replied that he would rather it were called the century of Darwin, whose principle

NB! · Archive · Society · Society Pages

Alexandr Radayev