NB! · In the Press · London · Society · Humour

Someone will object that the freedom to talk nonsense is not the same thing as freedom of speech, but according to the newspaper Metro, people refuse to accept that the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is not a nineteenth-century cross-dressing prosti

Books · Observations · Humour

Sumarokov condemned loanwords, while Trediakovsky derived the word amazon from omuzhonka

If Sumarokov railed against borrowings and called for the extermination of foreign words, declaring: "Foreign words are strange in conversation, stranger still in writing, and strangest of all in print. What will posterity say?", then his contemporary Vasily Trediakovsky, by contrast, found borrowings interesting and endowed them with

Books · Observations · People

It turns out that the real name of the writer and playwright Ludmila Petrushevskaya is Dolores

Ludmila Stefanovna relates that children bullied her over this name, and at the age of 15 she asked her mother to change it. She had always called herself Lyusya, and so she became Ludmila. Given the truly fantastic biography of this living Russian classic, I have no difficulty in believing

NB! · Interviews · Art · Paris · People

The new issue of Elle France carries a major interview with Annie Leibovitz

The new issue of Elle France carries a major interview with Annie Leibovitz. Solène Delos spoke to Annie on the occasion of her being awarded the William Klein Prize and the opening of Leibovitz's exhibition at the Académie des Beaux-Arts

NB! · Architecture · Mores

Continuing the theme of metal beds in the interior

NB! · Books · Observations · People

Incidentally, one fact is often left out of the account: the younger sister of Lilya Brik (1891-1978) was another remarkable woman of the twentieth century, the writer Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), wife of Louis Aragon

Archaeology · Architecture · London · Moscow

A 12th-century street in the Moscow Kremlin paved with the bones of domestic animals

This is what a seventeenth-century road paved with cattle bones looks like in Oxford. Bones as a road surface were used not only in England but more or less everywhere in Europe. In the Moscow Kremlin an entire street has been found, admittedly a far older one, dating from

NB! · Archive · Art · Paris · Humour

Alphonse Mucha snaps Paul Gauguin playing the harmonium in his studio without trousers

Close-up of a marble statue whose hands hold a foot, with a bust of a bearded man visible behind it in a museum gallery.

NB! · Archaeology · Art

The sculptural subject “Boy Removing a Thorn”, known since the 3rd century BC

Art That Makes You Feel: The Boy Removing a Thorn. A subject known since the 3rd century BC.

NB! · Art · Humour

Sir, Kindly Flail Your Arms Elsewhere

Sir, kindly flail your arms elsewhere. Adrien de Lelie, 1792.

Geography · Moscow · Mores · People

Maly Theatre actress Vera Shukhmina died in a railway accident on her way to Paris

Is It Wise to Swap Seats on Trains and Aeroplanes? Neither especially celebrated nor especially popular, but nonetheless leaving her mark on the history of the theatre, Vera Alekseyevna Shukhmina, an actress of the Maly Theatre, received an unexpected dismissal in 1925. A woman not yet old, proud and good-

NB! · Observations · Humour

Alexandr Radayev