Friday, 2 October 2026 · Almaty
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Humour

She who lives to eat and is mad for sweetmeats, whose only pleasure is her belly and her throat, who stuffs her cheeks and her paunch, a gluttonous queen, grows fat herself and makes her husband's purse lean

Faith · Monarchies · Observations · Society · Humour

She who lives to eat and is mad for sweetmeats, whose only pleasure is her belly and her throat, who stuffs her cheeks and her paunch, a gluttonous queen, grows fat herself and makes her husband's purse lean

The main thing is not to become like the Queen of England of 1625 to 1649, Henrietta Maria of France, as she is portrayed in satirical pamphlets. Deeply unpopular, she became the heroine of such insulting sketches; she was accused of extravagance, foreign influence and sympathy for the Catholic powers.

By Alexandr Radayev
A reminder that Darwin was not merely drawing up a list of the advantages and drawbacks of marriage before deciding to wed, but following the ideas of Benthamism then in vogue, and specifically Jeremy Bentham's schemes of "moral arithmetic"

Archive · Observations · Science · Mores · Humour

A reminder that Darwin was not merely drawing up a list of the advantages and drawbacks of marriage before deciding to wed, but following the ideas of Benthamism then in vogue, and specifically Jeremy Bentham's schemes of "moral arithmetic"

The Darwin archive holds an amusing sheet of paper on which he sets out the pluses of having a wife, such as tasty cooking and domestic cosiness, and the minuses, such as having to be friendly with a mother-in-law and putting up with a woman in his own

By Alexandr Radayev
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