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Books · Observations · Society · Humour
Portuguese President Rebelo de Sousa takes Russian books on Dostoevsky and Yesenin
Nothing special, just the President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in the company of our ambassador Mikhail Kamynin, loading up on Russian books. What, one wonders, will Señor Rebelo de Sousa (by Portuguese standards, still a short surname) be reading tonight? Apart from my Telegram channel, naturally. I can
Coming Up · Books · Observations
Meanwhile, Dostoevsky, one of the country's finest bookshops, is representing Russia and Russian literature at the Lisbon Book Fair, one of the oldest cultural festivals in Portugal
Meanwhile, Dostoevsky, one of the country's finest bookshops, is representing Russia and Russian literature at the Lisbon Book Fair, one of the oldest cultural festivals in Portugal. On the stand I see not only the classics and editions devoted to Dostoevsky, but also a good deal of ordinary
Architecture · Moscow · Heritage · Society Pages · Humour
Three stages of one cake: scroll through the photos from the latest to the earliest and you get, quite literally, the restoration chronology of the federally protected heritage site in whose shape the cake was made
In the year of its centenary, the Library of Foreign Literature has at last opened the restored late eighteenth-century house at Nikoloyamskaya, 6. The whole official upper crust of culture turned out for the occasion: the minister, deputies, heads of federal agencies, directors of institutions. Even Vladimir Medinsky sent
NB! · Observations · Science · Humour
By 1979 Computers Had Become Positively Tiny
By 1979 computers had become positively tiny. And the floppy disk! A mere trifle! I even mistook it for a nano-SIM
Archive · Science
Business computers in a 1971 illustration resembling IBM System/3 and System/360
1971. A small computer, built for the businessman. The upper machine resembles the IBM System/3, the lower one the IBM System/360.
NB! · Observations · Humour
Big Clay, at the Very Least, Has Been Immortalised on Yandex Maps
Art · Museums · Paris · Humour
The Venus of Vienne in the Louvre, without its Cupid, and the Hermitage Venus of Lely
When you have smeared the sun cream unevenly over your back and remain for ever after with a sunburnt handprint on the snow-white marble of your body. The Venus of Vienne, or Bathing Aphrodite, of the 1st-2nd centuries AD, from the collection of the Louvre, with the missing
Architecture · Moscow · Humour
The decor of the house of Hugo Eberling, owner of a joint-stock concrete-works company, in Basmanny Lane be like:
you just open random pages of books on heraldry and semiotics: "oh, that's pretty, let's have it on the façade", "oh, an eagle. Stick that on too", "a mascaron? Is that some sort of dessert?", "Masonic boots? We'
Archive · Mores · Society · People
Were such photographs not captioned, there would simply be no way of telling who is who, even for the most seasoned archivists
One might suppose that the frame is an ideological statement, yet we could just as easily take the picture for a prank. If you have ever looked through a good collection of photographs of that era, the chances are that it contained something of the kind: men larking about in
NB! · Observations · Society · Humour
Don't fret that your friends run you down behind your back: try explaining to them that you are better than Britain
Don't fret that your friends run you down behind your back: try explaining to them that you are better than Britain. On the evidence of the annihilated native peoples of North America, say, if nothing else