Art · Books · Museums · Heritage · People
Tropinin's portrait of Pushkin and the posthumous portrait by Karl Masur. In both, the poet wears a ring with a red stone on his thumb. Around this ring, one of Pushkin's favourite, a great many legends have clustered ever since it first appeared. They begin with
Art · Cinema · Museums · New York · Humour
Four-year-old Luise Perthes, captured by her parents' friend Philipp Otto Runge at the moment she realised that in the future she was destined to become a misanthropic lady with pigeons, wandering Central Park in New York in search of Kevin McCallister. Portrait of 1805, environs of Hamburg.
NB! · Archaeology · Books · Observations · Mores · Humour
One recalls Agatha Christie's remark about the archaeologist husband, who is so good for a woman because the older she grows, the more interesting she becomes to him. The writer lived to 85, and for 46 of those years she was married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who
Archive · In the Press · Science · Society · People
“I live in a flat whose doors are guarded by the police round the clock. Nobody is admitted to see me except members of my family. The price my old friend from Gorky pays for knowing us is an interrogation by the KGB after every visit. There is no telephone
NB! · Architecture · Heritage · Saint Petersburg
Before and after restoration. A favourite genre. A bas-relief on the façade of the apartment building at 19 Vosstaniya Street in Saint Petersburg
NB! · Coming Up · Archive · Moscow · People
Andrei Sakharov's Nobel certificate. A facsimile copy is on display at the Ground Solyanka gallery
Cinema · Observations · Pop Culture · Society Pages
The other day I attended the premiere of Ksenia Zueva's film "Intervention" with Anna Chipovskaya, who plays a girl in difficult life circumstances. It was most unusual to see Anna in a new guise, at least to my eye: that of an ordinary girl from our
Art · Observations · Society Pages
A chamber exhibition of Juan Miguel Palacios has opened at Polina Askery's gallery. The Spanish artist works in a unique technique, using paper, plasterboard, acrylic, cement, stone, wood and other most unexpected materials. Palacios's attention is centred on female images. The pictures, as you can see,
Archive · Faith · Science · Mores · Society
Once again I find entries on vaccination in nineteenth-century diaries. Our old acquaintance Willem de Clercq, poet, thinker and memoirist from the Netherlands, was in May 1827 extremely troubled by the subject of the smallpox vaccine. Today we know that the discovery of this vaccine changed the world and
NB! · Archive · Society
Books · Observations · Mores · Paris
The French writer Gandon recounts the German occupation of France. Among the hardships and horrors of those years he lists, on a par with the executions, grey bread, moonshine in place of wine, roasted barley in place of coffee, and cakes of buckwheat flour as hard as stone. It reads,
NB! · Observations