Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg

Repin on his 1903 painting “What Freedom!” and Stasov’s view of it

A Wind, but Not of Change. Ilya Repin's painting What Freedom! (1903) symbolises, in the critic Stasov's judgement, Russian youth who had not lost their courage, hopes and joyful expectations amid the misfortunes that beset them. By Repin's own account, he was simply walking

NB! · People · Humour

Alexander the Great in a Submarine

Faith · Art · Museums · Paris

Cain and Abel, Leonello Spada, 1614

The exhibition of Italian masterpieces "Naples in Paris" at the Louvre

A small metal censer hangs on a chain beside a wall of wide wooden planks. The planks carry faded paintings: red and ochre scrolls and plant ornament.

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Hanging censer by a wooden wall with remnants of ornamental painting

Interior of a log house with walls, ceiling and furniture covered in bright floral painting, with a table and benches by the windows.

NB! · Architecture · Art · Museums · Ethnography

Olav Hanssen's 1784 house with rosemaling decoration in the Heddal museum

Heddal Museum of Traditional Norwegian Folk Art, a house of 1784 built by Olav Hansen. The walls and ceiling are decorated with the folk painting known as rosemaling

Map screenshot of the Adriatic Sea, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. A red marker labelled Plava Laguna sits on Istria's western coast, north of Pula.

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Map of the northern Adriatic with a Plava Laguna marker on the Istrian coast

Cinema · Humour

Incidentally, on Luc Besson and The Fifth Element

Incidentally, on Luc Besson and The Fifth Element. The space diva Plavalaguna, invented by Besson, who performs the aria of Lucia di Lammermoor in the voice of the Albanian opera singer Inva Mula, owes her otherworldly name to the Croatian seaside resort of Plava Laguna, where Luc Besson spent a

NB! · Coming Up · Cinema · Museums · Paris · Pop Culture

Jean-Paul Gaultier's costumes from Luc Besson's The Fifth Element at the Paris Fashion Museum, in the Expo1997 retrospective, open until 17 July

London · Mores · Society

The scale of tea smuggling in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reached incredible proportions, almost equalling the country's official imports of tea, some 11,000 tonnes a year

The scale of tea smuggling in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reached incredible proportions, almost equalling the country's official imports of tea, some 11,000 tonnes a year. From the early 1700s demand for tea grew without pause. So did the customs duties. The

NB! · Archaeology · Geography · Maps

The Spread of Slavic Culture in the 4th to 7th Centuries

Coming Up · Observations · Pop Culture · Saint Petersburg

Young pianists to perform Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Schubert in 26 Pianissimo concerts

From 1 July to 26 August the Hermitage, GES-2 and the Pakgauzy in Nizhny Novgorod host the Pianissimo summer festival. Twenty-six concerts in which works by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Schubert will be performed by talented young pianists who, in keeping with good tradition, stand at the

Archive · London · Monarchies · Observations

Tsarevich Nicholas and the Duke of York George at a London wedding in 1893

The cousins Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich and George, Duke of York, in 1893, before they became Emperor Nicholas II (in 1894) and King George V (in 1910). The photograph was taken when the Tsarevich Nicholas was in London for the wedding of the Duke of York and Princess Mary of Teck.

Alexandr Radayev