NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Observations · Humour

They Stand There Swapping Jokes, Delighted

They stand there swapping jokes, delighted. Recalling, no doubt, the secret memoirs of Edward VIII on his collaboration with the Third Reich and his plans to regain the throne with Hitler's help.

NB! · Archive · Monarchies · People · Pop Culture

Mood: Elizabeth II through the lens of François-Marie Banier, 1992

Archive · The East · Geography · Books

The Russian Empire is bounded on the north by the Northern Ocean; on the east it is parted from America by the Eastern, Pacific or Kamchatka Sea; on the south it borders upon Chinese and Free Tartary, upon Persia, Georgia and Little Tartary; and on the we

From the Methodical Geographical Description of the Russian Empire, with a Proper Introduction to a Thorough Knowledge of the Terrestrial Globe and of Europe in General, 1776. By Chinese Tartary, in all likelihood, are meant the lands of present-day Mongolia and China; by Free Tartary, the lands of Turkestan

Archive · Art · Monarchies · Moscow · Mores · Society

Apollinary Vasnetsov and the menus of the coronation dinners in Moscow in May 1896

Menu of the dinner for the volost elders, 18 May 1896, at the Petrovsky Palace on the occasion of the coronation of Nicholas II, printed in colour lithography at the Levenson quick-printing house from sketches by Apollinary Vasnetsov, younger brother of t. Apollinary Vasnetsov, like his brother, took part

NB! · Archive · Monarchies

Four generations of the Swedish royal family: King Gustaf V, his son Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, his grandson Gustaf Adolf and his great-grandson Carl Gustaf, born in 1946

Archaeology · Archive · The East · Observations · Mores · Humour

The text of a clay tablet: a letter to his mother from a son who complains that she does not buy him fine clothes, while the clothes of the other young gentlemen grow finer with every passing year

The boy cites the son of his father's assistant, who has two new sets of clothes. "Even though you bore me, and his mother merely adopted him, his mother loves him, and you do not love me!" 3,500 years have passed, and so little has

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Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna during her illness in 1910

NB! · Archive · Art

Dionysus Slays the Alchemist Who Drew a Shadow out of a Ray of Light

Dionysus slays the alchemist who drew a shadow out of a ray of light. Apollo bears his soul up to the sun. From an alchemical treatise of the 17th century

Icon-style illustration of a grey-haired haloed saint with a sword facing a crowned skeleton in a black cloak, with a fortress between them.

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Sergey Yukhimov’s illustrations for “The Lord of the Rings” in the 1993 Russian edition

The greatest illustrations to "The Lord of the Rings", 1980-1990, by Sergey Yukhimov. They were published in the 1993 Russian edition

Archive · Architecture · Monarchies · Heritage

A project to remodel the Acropolis by the celebrated Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whom Otto, the first King of the Greeks, invited to design a royal palace in Athens, a small provincial town of some 10,000 inhabitants…

Schinkel was far ahead of his time in proposing that the palace be built literally on the site of the ancient temples, folding the ruins of the age of Pericles into a residential and administrative royal quarter. In effect, this would have meant the destruction of the Acropolis with all

Archive · Books · People

Glinka on how the partisan Davydov burned his own house in Borodino before the battle

It turns out that the village of Borodino belonged to Denis Davydov, who became famous in the war of 1812. Sergey Nikolayevich Glinka recalls that the partisan Davydov set fire to his own house in Borodino with his own hands, before a battle had even been appointed to take place

Newspaper clipping with the grid of crossword No. 78, showing numbered rows and columns and black squares, with part of a decorative heading above.

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Krestoslovitsa No. 78 in a 1943 émigré newspaper, the forgotten Russian name for a crossword

Krestoslovitsa ("cross-wordery") is the forgotten Russian name for the crossword. If you are sure of your breadth of knowledge and pride yourself on your erudition, do try your hand at this puzzle from an émigré newspaper of 1943.