Archive · Books · Mores
When I was a boy of seven or eight, I had a passion for the cheap mint gingerbreads sold on our quiet street, in a little hole-in-the-wall shop; for some reason they were called "zhamki", and for a kopeck you were given two of them.
Archaeology · Archive · The East · Science · People
James Leslie Starkey is known to everyone who has had anything to do with biblical archaeology, and to almost no one outside it. In 1935 he found the "Lachish Letters", potsherds bearing the correspondence of a Judaean garrison on the eve of the Babylonian assault of 588 BC,
Archive · Books · Madrid · Mores · Paris · People
Everyone remembers that Coco Chanel was a collaborator and worked for the Abwehr, that is, for German military intelligence? This is not conjecture or gossip but a well-documented part of her biography. So, she not only tried, with the help of her fascist patrons, to wrest a perfume company
The Golden Age · Archive · Architecture · Art · Museums
In an 1856 photograph by the Berlin photographer Leopold Ahrendts, attentive spectators on the steps of Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin are absorbed in August Kiss's sculpture "Amazon on Horseback Attacked by a Panther". Cast in the 1840s, the sculpture was a sensation for
NB! · The Golden Age · Archive · In the Press · London · Pop Culture · Humour
Beatlemania, provoking emotions as on a painting by Munch
The Golden Age · Archive · Books · Mores · Society · Saint Petersburg
The playbill of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre announces a full repeat of the staged "Trial of Raskolnikov" on 21 November 1921 On 11 November 1921 (30 October, Old Style) it was one hundred years since the birth of Dostoevsky, and Petrograd marked the writer's jubilee. A
The Golden Age · Archive · Books · Observations · Education
A wish for all children for the coming week: Beware, children, of idleness As of a bad habit. And read each day If only a single page. Literal translation A little verse by Alexander Kruglov from the endpaper of "My First Alphabet Book", published in 1890 by the
The Golden Age · NB! · Archive · Cinema · People
Catherine Deneuve in October 1967, during the shooting of the film "Manon 70" directed by Jean Aurel
The East · Archive · Faith · Books · Ethnography
Let me tell you about an interesting book. The University of Nebraska Press has published Tilton and Grace Entoka: An Osage Story by the writer Anthony Lookout. The Osage are one of the indigenous peoples of North America; the book is devoted to Native storytellers and appears in the series
The Golden Age · NB! · Archive · Architecture · Art · Monarchies
Marie Antoinette's apartments at Fontainebleau and the design for their decoration by Pierre Rousseau, 1785-86.
Archive · Cinema · Science · Paris
In the spring of 1838, Louis Daguerre, the French painter and inventor of the daguerreotype, was testing a camera on which he had been working for almost a year. The daguerreotype was the first practical method of photography: the image appeared on a silvered copper plate. Daguerre photographed the view
Archive · Books · London · Observations · The Golden Age · The East
A title that, by today's standards, is seditious Nancy Cunard, heiress to the British shipping line Cunard Line, was a poet and a publisher, and in February 1934 she brought out, with the London house of Wishart, the anthology “Negro”, Negro Anthology 1931-1933. Cunard dedicated the book