NB! · Faith · The East · Books · Observations · Humour
A 45-metre demon from an Urdu-language book about an island where terrifying voices can be heard, where King Solomon shut away the vanquished unclean spirits. This demon, apparently, licked its victims to death. I am perfectly willing to believe it and have no wish to meet him
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"If a great feast is to be held, the master must oversee everything himself: the kitchen, the carving-room and the bakehouse. To serve the dishes at table, a capable man should be appointed, and at the sideboard, with the drinks and the vessels, an experienced man is needed
Books · London · Mores · Humour
Shakespeare's texts contain a good many winged phrases, metaphors and euphemisms that are sometimes far from easy to decipher. But once you know the Bard's habitual devices, ticklish sexual particulars are discovered behind the absurd constructions. Thus with the phrase "charged chamber" Shakespeare denoted
NB! · Books · Monarchies · Observations
I noticed a rather odd passage in Part II of Shakespeare's Henry IV, which seems even more preposterous in the Russian translation. But even this gibberish has an explanation
NB! · Art · Books · Humour
A dish of the eighteenth century. Only this is not the crow and the fox, and Krylov has nothing to do with it: these are Master Raven and Master Fox of Jean de La Fontaine
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The ban on balalaikas is usually linked to a decree of 1648 by Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, which ordered stringed instruments to be destroyed. But the idea of banning musical amusements was originally laid down in the answers of the Stoglav Council of 1551, so called for the number of its
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Books · Monarchies · People
It is to the Battle of Bosworth, or rather to Shakespeare's reading of it, that we owe the phrase "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!": the mount of Richard III Plantagenet had become stuck in a bog. As we know, no horse was
Faith · Books · Mores
The eighteenth century produced several bestsellers on masturbation, which naturally condemned it as not merely sinful but exceedingly harmful. There were, it is true, works that refuted the delusion, but, as so often happens, they never won popularity enough to dispel the myth. To the eighteenth century we also owe
Faith · Books · Mores · Humour
Since time immemorial, lilies have been a symbol of innocence. Christians linked the image of this flower with the tears of Eve and with the Virgin Mary. In the Middle Ages the lily, precisely in its meanings associated with purity, was widespread in mythology, in iconography and in heraldry alike.
Books · Observations · Mores · Ethnography
In the 11th and 12th centuries a struggle unfolded in Rus' between two types of matrimonial norm: the exogamous (forbidding marriage within a family, clan, tribe or other group) and the endogamous (permitting it). Strange as it may seem, this confrontation is reflected in the bylina of Ilya Muromets,
NB! · Books · Society · People
The book by KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny, "The Soviet Special Services in the Secret War", contains a curious episode about Pasternak. His words on the attempt by Western intelligence services to promote a "dissident" sound especially lively