Books · Observations · Ethnography · Humour
The author issues a warning without specifying its subject
Welsh Folklore of 1909 records this omen: if you wish to die, eat cabbage in August. As they say, I have merely done my duty and warned you.
Section
· 1793 stories
Books
Books · Monarchies · Museums · Mores · Society
Cupid and Sideron, court Moors of William V, in the Hague Historical Museum
In the Historical Museum of The Hague, it is impossible to walk past two child mannequins in eighteenth-century royal livery. These exhibits are a modern reconstruction of the costumes of two court Moors, as Black people were then commonly called at court: Cupido and Sideron. The first came from
Archaeology · Books · Mores · People
Archaeological finds on Kipling's land and the book “Puck of Pook's Hill”
In 1902 Rudyard Kipling bought, at a bargain price, an ancient house near the hamlet of Burwash in Sussex. The road to the house ran over a high hill, and to climb it a carriage needed a second horse harnessed on, which did little for the property's appeal
Books · London · Heritage · Education · Society
Oxford installs a plaque to Codrington's slaves while his statue stays in the library
Not long ago a plaque was put up in Oxford to commemorate those who worked in slave conditions on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies. It is the work of a group that seeks to publicise Oxford's colonial past. In 2017 its activists demanded that the statues
Archaeology · Faith · Cinema · Books · Museums · Observations
The mountain of hands in the Archaeological Museum of Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, recalled the touching scene in «Call Me by Your Name» in which the heroes attend the raising of a statue from the bed of the Aegean Sea, and Oliver hands Elio a bronz
These hands, too, have been raised from the depths, though not of the sea but of a marsh. The pottery found in 1891 in the marsh of Santa Gilla dates from the 4th-3rd centuries BC. These are votive hands, that is, offered as gifts in fulfilment of a vow,
Books · London · Mores · Society
Hallie Rubenhold’s “The Five” reexamines the stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims
British historian Hallie Rubenhold has published a book on the anatomy of Jack the Ripper's crimes, 'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper'. The work is of interest not only from the standpoint of criminology, but also as an anthropological
Faith · Books · London · Mores · Ethnography
In Shakespeare's Cymbeline there are these lines:
Yes, he has fallen asleep In the last, eternal, unwaking sleep. I shall make a coffin his bed, Fairies will gather at his grave And no worm will dare creep into it. Literal translation Indeed, in ancient Britain there was a belief that fairies take particular care of young corpses
Books · Observations · Society
A question to Putin about serfdom and the farming troubles of Konstantin Levin
A question to Putin about the return of serfdom reminded me of my beloved Konstantin Levin, who discovered that the feeding racks were broken and had not been mended since winter. And the threshing machine was broken too, for the muzhiks simply did not like the contraption. And the carpenter
Books · Observations · Society
A Karl Marx quotation on past traditions in works on Latin America and Petrarch
"The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits
Books · Society · People
Charles Chesnutt, the octoroon and the American rule of one drop of blood
In his day the American writer Charles Chesnutt was called an octoroon, a designation resting on the notorious "one-drop rule". "Octoroon" or "octaroon" is a racial term adopted in the United States for people with one eighth of African blood, that is, 12%
Faith · Art · Books
Repin's paintings “Go After Me, Satan” and the dispute over translating a line from Matthew's Gospel
Ilya Repin has several paintings titled “Get thee behind me, Satan”. In them, a hideous figure of the devil stands behind Jesus. The words are a disputed quotation from chapter 4 of the Gospel of Matthew: some maintain that the Greek and Church Slavonic texts say “go (follow) behind me”
NB! · Architecture · Books · Heritage