NB! · Archive · London · Monarchies · Pop Culture

Tatler cover devoted to the coronation of Elizabeth II, June 1953

NB! · Art · Observations · Pop Culture

Thanks to Yandex Go Ultima, I now have a whole collection of works by Pepperstein 💙

Stone wall with an Anecdotes Wall sign, metal plaques with text and two illustrations, one showing a horse-drawn carriage.

NB! · The East · Observations · Humour

Wall of Anecdotes in Three Languages on Gyumri's Central Square

The central square of Gyumri, a wall of jokes in three languages. At the very least it is charming, at the very most, inspired!

Art

Truth, Repentance, Calumny and King Midas in an allegorical painting by Botticelli

The Calumny (The Calumny of Apelles) by Sandro Botticelli, painted in 1495 after the description of a picture by the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece, Apelles. Naked Truth recalls Botticelli's most famous picture, the Venus. She appears before us in all her primordial purity, covered by nothing

Geography · Observations · Science · Mores

Parisian millstones in English mills and Derbyshire gritstone

From an article on English milling I learnt that coarse Derbyshire millstone grit would do for grindstones, but the finest material was held to be stone from quarries outside Paris, which every millowner of any means tried to import. So for centuries the English were, quite literally, eating bread ground

NB! · Architecture · Faith · Humour

A Lion with a Brilliant Hairdo in the Twelfth-Century Church of St Michael in the English Village of Tefont Evias

NB! · Cinema · People · Pop Culture

The Last Photograph on Inna Churikova's Instagram, 1 January 2023

NB! · Archaeology · The East · Madrid · Museums · People

The Spanish consul in Egypt in the 1880s, Eduardo Toda y Güell, dressed as a mummy, and the collection of Egyptian antiquities assembled by him and sold in 1887, to the number of 1300 items, to the National Archaeological Museum of Spain

NB! · Cinema · Pop Culture

An octopus cloak from the American silent comedy “The Affairs of Anatol” (1921), worn by the actress Bebe Daniels

Archive · Moscow · Society · Nature

Pigeon feeders in 1950s Moscow and the decision to cull the birds after the youth festival

In the 1950s, Moscow was full of pigeon feeders like this one in Sokolniki. One could come across a sign in the city reading “Caution, pigeons!”. But a couple of years after thousands of pigeons were released at the opening of the World Festival of Youth and Students, there turned