Archive · The East · Art · People
A miniature of 1635, sold twice at Sotheby's: twenty years ago and again last year. All this time the man in the portrait remained unknown: he was thought to be from Abyssinia or North Africa. Imagine the astonishment of the owners of this trifle when it emerged that
NB! · Observations
NB! · Monarchies · Paris · Pop Culture · Humour
NB! · Observations · Humour
Aristocracy · Art · Museums · Mores · Humour
Sabina Poppaea, unknown artist of the School of Fontainebleau, 1550–1570, Museum of Art and History, Geneva. Tacitus wrote that the Empress Poppaea, wife of Nero, drew the attention of the Romans by strolling about naked, wrapped only in a gauze veil, as women of easy virtue commonly went. This
Art · Mores · Paris
Courtesans Go to the Louvre, 1586. "Courtesan" derives from the word court, which was, one way or another, the centre of courtly life and of state administration. Originally a "courtesan" was a person admitted to that court and initiated into certain matters: a courtier at a
Books · Observations · Society
A question to Putin about the return of serfdom reminded me of my beloved Konstantin Levin, who discovered that the feeding racks were broken and had not been mended since winter. And the threshing machine was broken too, for the muzhiks simply did not like the contraption. And the carpenter
NB! · Society · Humour
NB! · Society · Humour
Observations · Science · Education
Thomson's tube is a glass vacuum vessel which the English scientist Joseph Thomson used in his experiment on the properties of cathode rays. In my day this was covered in the school physics course, and attention was usually drawn to the fact that the cathode-ray tubes of
Archaeology · Museums · Science · People
The renowned Bigfoot and ancient hominid researcher, cryptozoologist, anthropologist, evolutionist, university lecturer, writer and simply a most original man, Grover Krantz, bequeathed his body to science. Krantz, who was seventy and dying of cancer, approached his colleague David Hunt, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, shortly before his death, asking
Books · Observations · Society
"The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits