Archaeology · Museums · Heritage
Can you imagine that this wig is 3,900 years old? This ancient Egyptian wig from the collection of the British Museum dates to the 12th Dynasty and was acquired in the nineteenth century. Naturally, the wig owes its superb state of preservation to restoration, so perhaps not every hair
NB! · Observations · Humour
Archive · Monarchies · Mores · People
The arrested Peter III asked Catherine for the Negro who used to amuse him, his favourite dog, a violin, a Bible and a few novels. True, Catherine herself tells Poniatowski in a letter that Peter also asked for his mistress, Elizaveta Vorontsova, but she refused to send her, though she
Books · Science · Nature · Ethnography
There are many signs of the harsh frosts to come, but the surest is clouds that form fiery rings or even columns about the setting sun, making a kind of phantom city, or blazing pyramid-shaped rays that rise from the sun into the heavens. And when these fiery crimson
London · Mores · People · Humour
The Cat That Won the Poet's Heart. One of the strangest burial stories is attributed to the funeral of the English poet Thomas Hardy in 1928. Hardy lived to the age of 87. His body was cremated, and his ashes were interred in Poets' Corner in Westminster
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Count Münnich
Observations · Society · People
Yury Solomin was Russia's Minister of Culture during the collapse of the USSR, though only very briefly: less than a month at the end of 1991. This was still the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR. By then Solomin was already artistic director of the Maly Theatre. It
NB! · Archive · Architecture · London · Society
A vegetable garden in the moat of the Tower of London during the Second World War. The moat was drained on the orders of the Duke of Wellington in the 1840s, to rid the city of the miasma of stagnant water; since then it had simply grown grass, on which
NB! · Art · People