Archive · Museums · Heritage · Society

Looting of Yasnaya Polyana in 1941 and the rescue of Tolstoy's house from arson

During the Great Patriotic War, Yasnaya Polyana Was Occupied by the Nazis for a Month and a Half. Tolstoy's house was turned into barracks and storerooms; a cobbler's workshop was installed in it, and in the "room under the vaults", where War and Peace

NB! · Art · Observations

What marvellous hair Mary Magdalene has 💛

Archive · Observations · Science

The subtractive rule in Roman numerals and older variants of their notation

At times one comes across original formats of Roman numerals that differ from the familiar ones. /For the sake of clarity, in the explanation below I shall separate the orders of magnitude with full stops; this is permissible/ As regards the notation we are accustomed to, 1899 ought to be

NB! · Architecture · Observations

Russian window surrounds on an Italian garden pavilion at the Villa Garibaldi in Palermo, designed by the great nineteenth-century architect Giovanni Battista Filippo Basile

NB! · Monarchies

The young King Philippe of Belgium (in 2013 the living King Albert II abdicated in favour of his son) with his wife Mathilde (turquoise sashes) visiting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (purple sash)

NB! · Mores · Pop Culture

How to Improve One's Looks in the Eighteenth Century

Observations · Mores · Society · Pop Culture

Yury Averbakh on living chess in the USSR of the 1950s and the OBKhSS intervention

I am often asked about my chess past. Above all it is a draughts past, strictly speaking, but I remember plenty of stories from the lives of chess players. I recall a tale told by the well-known Soviet chess official Yury Averbakh, who is now 95. He once shared

NB! · Monarchies · Mores · Paris

The Imperial Toilette of the Second Empire

NB! · Observations · Nature · Humour

So many people against one wretched snake: hardly sporting

Portrait in a gilded Rococo frame: a figure in pink drapery and an animal skin, holding a club, against rocks and sky.

NB! · Aristocracy · Art · Humour

Jean-Marc Nattier's Portrait of the Duke of Chaulnes as Hercules

The half-naked woman in rags, armed with a club, is in fact the Duchesse de Chaulnes as Hercules. It must be said that Jean-Marc Nattier, a painter well known among the aristocracy, made a better job of his portraits of Peter I and Catherine I

NB! · Archive · Observations · Humour

Found my hairstyle of the day on a nameless queen in a fourteenth-century manuscript, while a dim-witted gatekeeper leans out of his window, ready to pass comment on our hairdresser

NB! · Faith · Moscow · Museums · Observations

The reliquary of Mary of Egypt recalled the "Saint Louis" exhibition in the Patriarch's Palace of the Moscow Kremlin, to which a glass casket from the Crown of Thorns was brought, but without the Crown, that is, simply an empty bit of glass

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