NB! · Art · Observations · Mores · Humour
NB! · Art · Observations · Mores · Humour
Archive · Books · Moscow · Science · Mores
Adam Olearius, in his "Detailed Description of the Journey of the Holstein Embassy to Muscovy and Persia in 1633, 1636 and 1639", relates the following incident:. "...a barber named Quirinus, a Dutchman and a man of merry disposition, being in the service of the Grand Duke, kept
NB! · Archive · Observations · Mores · Paris
A drinking fountain in Paris in the 20th century and in the 21st. From which century would you care to take a sip?
NB! · Faith · Mores · Society
In 1916 the Holy Synod banned the New Year tree. A tradition that had come from Germany was swept up in the general anti-German hysteria of the First World War
Archive · Mores · Paris · Humour
Tasty, and That's Full Stop: A Hundred Years Ago. A man awaiting his chips in Paris in 1920
Geography · Observations · Mores · Society · Nature
Originally, lobsters in America were a very cheap and plentiful food, so much so that they were associated with poverty. They were used as animal feed, and workers campaigned for a limit on the amount of lobster in their weekly rations. The product owed its popularity to the arrival of
NB! · Museums · Mores · Humour
Books · Mores · Education · Humour
Advice on How to Keep the Young from the Temptation of Drunkenness, from an Encyclopaedia of 1597. The Lacedaemonians, that is, the Spartans, would parade a drunken serf before their children, so as to instil in them an utter loathing of drunkenness as the vilest of all passions
NB! · Books · Mores · Society
Art · Books · Mores
Oh, how I long to go back, Oh, how I long to burst into the little town, Onto our street of three houses, Where everything is plain and familiar, for just a day. Where people walk in on you without asking, Where there is no envy and no spite, a
Archive · Books · Mores · People · Humour
Knight of the Rueful Countenance, Dostoevsky, dear little puffball, on the nose of literature you glow like a fresh new pimple. Among Nekrasov's verses there is one entitled "Belinsky's Epistle to Dostoevsky", written in January 1846. It is sometimes described as "collective"
Aristocracy · Observations · Mores
A mere scrap of parchment is enough to confer nobility upon a deserving man, but that scrap of parchment possesses none of the virtue that bestows upon his descendants talent, conduct or wisdom