The East · Art · Museums · Observations · Mores
Do you remember the porcelain decanter in the shape of a fish, with little fish-shaped glasses, found in so many Soviet interiors? We have such a fish at home too, inherited from my grandmother, and in two colour variations at that; it was mass-produced at the porcelain factory
Architecture · In the Press · Faith · Heritage
The BBC shows how Wells Cathedral looked in the 1400s. Most Gothic buildings, in Britain at least, were once brightly painted, like many of the structures and monuments of the ancient world, which we too are more accustomed to seeing in monochrome, their many colours lost over the years. Besides
Observations · Society · People · Pop Culture
There is a much-repeated recollection of Ella Fitzgerald's: when she was not being invited to sing in clubs because she was black, Marilyn Monroe offered the manager of the prestigious Mocambo club to come and sit at a table right by the stage, reserved for all the
NB! · Observations · Humour
Greetings to all my Mayanist acquaintances. And no greetings whatever to the Fomenkoites 🙃
NB! · Art · Observations
Self-Portrait of John Bellany with His Friend Alan Davie. 1985. Two famous Scottish artists with strange creatures of the seashore, somehow reminiscent of Roerich and Konenkov
Archive · Moscow · Mores · Nature
Asparagus was loved and cultivated in Russia, even in Moscow, from the seventeenth century at the latest. The German Olearius recalls: “There are also kitchen vegetables of every kind, especially asparagus as thick as a finger, such as I myself ate at the house of a certain Dutch merchant, a
NB! · Faith · Observations · People · Humour
Well, well: Nikita Mikhalkov has moved to the Spas television channel. He tells us how the Emperor Constantine hamstrung his own horses(!), and how the Emperor Diocletian grew cabbages. For which, much thanks
Archive · Science · Humour
No, this is not a device for readjusting to normal locomotion after emerging from a three-month sofa quarantine. All the more so as we have no such emergence to look forward to just yet. This is an advertisement for an apparatus of 1882 devised by Lewis Sayre. The American
Archive · Books · London · Mores · People
In May 1824 one of the greatest crimes in the history of English literature was committed in London. Barely a month after Byron's death, his memoirs were destroyed. And this was done in the presence of the poet's close friends and his executor. Memoirs are usually
Books · People
..Laughter, strictly speaking, is what saved me. Having passed through every stage of hatred and despair, I reached that height from which the ridiculous is visible as on the palm of one's hand. Having burst out laughing, I was cured, like that anecdotal fellow whose "abscess burst
NB!
Architecture · Geography · Cinema · Museums
Orava Castle is a medieval fortress in Slovakia, perched on a 112-metre rock above the little River Orava. It was here that the 1922 film "Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror" was shot. True, in the plot the castle stands in Romania. In 2015 the castle, which had