NB! · Archive · Art · Books
The Wheel of Fortune in a 15th-century edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's "On the Fates of Illustrious Men and Women" looks like a carousel, with a king enthroned at the very top while courtiers tumble from the rickety side seats
Archive · Education · Society
In the 1920s, among other things, the word "class" was abolished in secondary schools as a bourgeois survival. Classes came to be called groups
Archive · Cinema · Mores · People
In Tarkovsky's "Mirror" there is an episode with the doctor's wife, played by Larisa, Andrei's second wife, with Maria Nikolayevna, played by the director's mother Maria Ivanovna, and with an exchange of earrings. The business of the earrings, it turns
NB! · Archive · Art · Monarchies · Humour
13 June 1803: Britain resumed hostilities against France. The full-bodied Britannia lashes Napoleon's bloodied backside: take this and that, and be warned, provoke me no more
NB! · Archive · Museums · Society
Stamps for every occasion in a chekist's life: prohibit, special control, secret. The KGB Museum, Vilnius
NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Observations · People · Humour
An amusing photograph of Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald looking thoroughly ill at ease in court dress. Note in particular those wonderful little feet
NB! · Archive · Science · Mores
How was a solar eclipse observed in the seventeenth century? On 12 August 1654, people looked at the sun through smoked glass; the more resourceful used a mirror, and the very cunning a dish or a bucket of water
Aristocracy · Archive · Monarchies · Mores · Society · Humour
Princess Olga Paley, the morganatic wife of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, sixth son of Alexander II, has an interesting recollection of how, at the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks came to requisition her palace at Tsarskoye Selo. The Soviet had resolved to occupy the palace for want of premises. Paley
NB! · Archive · London · Mores
NB! · Archive · Monarchies · People
Archive · Books · Observations · Society · Humour
I once came across a remarkable letter from the Jewish writer Vergelis to the Party Bureau of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR on the "vicious peculiarities" of Jewish literature. The author surveys the work of several Jewish writers: Hofstein, Albirt, Fefer, Der Nister, Bergelson, Dobrushin,
Archive · Books · Moscow · Observations · Society
In 1949 Alexandr Alexandrovich Fadeyev, then General Secretary and Chairman of the Board of the Writers' Union, appealed to Stalin with a proposal to close the Yiddish-language almanacs and dissolve the associations of Jewish writers. The letter from the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee