NB! · Archive · Society · People · Humour
Did someone say gerontocracy? In this photograph from the inauguration of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, in January 1961 we see Nancy Pelosi, familiar to us as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who is still to this day engaged in key roles in
Archive · Art · Books
The death of Julius Caesar, from Giovanni Boccaccio's "On the Fates of Illustrious Men and Women". 1475 edition. Bleeding, Caesar, crowned and wearing an ermine-trimmed mantle, clutches at a marble column surmounted by a statue, while five helmeted soldiers attack him, two of them running
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I doubt it. Especially when I read, for instance, in a letter from Charles Dickens to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whether he knows of the new Russian authors, such as Nikolai Gogol and his "Taras Bulba".
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Archive · Architecture · Faith · Paris
Did Someone Send for Elena the Flying? The year is 1917, the First World War at its height. In France, empty churches are turned into workshops, parish buildings into homes, and chapels are fitted out as kitchens. The chapel on the rue des Barres in the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris
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A centaur complains to Saint Anthony. About the monkey, presumably. From a fifteenth-century manuscript on fantastic beasts
NB! · Aristocracy · Archive · People
Nikolai Yusupov, principal heir to the Yusupov fortune and to the princely title of his mother, Zinaida Yusupova, Count Sumarokov-Elston. Elder brother of Felix Yusupov. Killed in a duel in 1908, aged 25
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Dear collective-farm women, fight for organisational and economic management! Esteemed proletarian women, master aviation technology! Sweet peasant women, strengthen your alliance with the workers! My dear women workers, reinforce the shock brigades! Women, girls, little girls, a happy militant holiday to you, women of the whole world! Cherish the
NB! · Archive · Art · Ethnography
Czech carnival in Olomouc, 1968. Photograph by Josef Koudelka; the picture is titled Exiles
NB! · Archive · Faith · People
Cardinal Bergoglio and Pope John Paul II. Jorge Mario Bergoglio became a cardinal on 21 February 2001; twelve years later he would be elected Pope.
NB! · Archive · Books · People · Nature
Archive · Books · Observations
The Prague Archive was fitted out with very convenient booths with lifting mechanisms for using vertically oriented card cabinets. Today all this is, of course, obsolete: card catalogues are being replaced everywhere by electronic ones, which is, in my view, a serious mistake, one we shall yet have cause to