Observations · Mores · Ethnography

Hollow inside baked bread in folk omens: a relative's death or an imminent pregnancy

A note for the housewife: if a large hollow forms inside a loaf during baking, it may foretell the death of one of your nearest and dearest. Happily, folk omens are not ultimatums, and besides death they promise, for instance, an early pregnancy. The principle is clear enough: empty space

NB! · Art · Books

Alice in Wonderland by the American artist Helen M.

Alice in Wonderland by the American artist Helen M. Turner, 1923

Museums · Nature

Japanese spider crab at Bexhill Museum in Bexhill-on-Sea and its size

A Japanese spider crab in the collection of the Bexhill Museum in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex. The museum itself is Edwardian in its modesty: it has just two members of staff, and its collection consists of the curiosities assembled by the museum's curator, John Sargent, together with

Coloured caricature: a man in a striped suit and a woman in a white high-waisted dress walk hand in hand beneath enormous multicoloured feathers.

NB! · Art · London · Mores · Humour

High waistlines in the fashion of Georgian Londoners in a caricature of 1794

What do you know about the high waist? Look at these ordinary Londoners of the Georgian era. 1794 might never have been

NB! · Archive · Observations · Mores · Humour

What a dreadful woman she is, that Portsmouth Kate: back in the Welsh news again, this time for causing a disturbance and using foul language in the street!

What a dreadful woman she is, that Portsmouth Kate: back in the Welsh news again, this time for causing a disturbance and using foul language in the street! But to my mind, the countless arrests merely show the unbending character of this 34-year-old madam

A round stone tower with a bell at the top rises above weathered castle walls around a grassy courtyard. Narrow windows and arched doorways pierce the walls under a pale sky.

NB!

Courtyard of a ruined medieval castle with a round tower

NB! · Architecture · Heritage

One of the most "Instagrammable" views in the South of France: the ruined thirteenth-century fortress of Najac in Aveyron, the main sight of a commune with a population of no more than 800

Cinema · Observations · Humour

Michel Piccoli worked trouserless before it became mainstream

Michel Piccoli worked trouserless before it became mainstream. A still from Pierre Granier-Deferre's 1981 film "A Strange Affair" ("L'Étrange Affaire"). The circumstances in question are far from the humour with which a state of semi-undress is received today. The affair

London · Monarchies · Observations · Mores · Society · People

Titus Oates invented a Popish plot against Charles II and was convicted of perjury

Recalling Titus Oates, the English conspirator and scoundrel of the seventeenth century, one cannot help thinking of our own contemporaries, who have inscribed their loathsome deeds in the book of the scum of all ages. Oates is known for having invented a certain Popish Plot to murder King Charles II.

Aristocracy · Art · Monarchies

Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria and Sir Jeffrey Hudson with Medici symbols

Van Dyck, Portrait of Henrietta Maria, Daughter of Henry IV of France and Sister of Louis XIII, with Sir Jeffrey Hudson. The 24-year-old queen is depicted in fashionable European dress, which the court ladies of England had begun to wear after her example. The orange tree in the

NB! · Books

Shtozh

Old black-and-white group photograph of seven people by a house window, two elderly sitters in the centre.

Archive · People · Humour

Mozart's wife Constanze Weber at 78 in a group photograph

- Your grandmother? - Not quite. This is Mozart's wife, the 78-year-old Constanze Weber.

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