Books · Observations · Mores · Humour
Since yesterday the Lord tried my patience with seventeen minutes of waiting for a waiter at Kofemania, I have resolved to give up restaurant food until the end of the year. Happily, the Foreign Literature Library has put a selection of New Year recipes on its website. I have already
Archive · Mores · Humour
If Death appears in the sky in a shroud, with a coffin under his arm, expect overcast skies. If the Pope, the king, the cardinals and the gentlemen are all in the jaws of a beast, expect heat. If, at the same time, there are also traffic jams of 9
London · Monarchies · Mores · People
There is a story about Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and her life in emigration. After the death of her own aunt, Maria Feodorovna, George V installed her daughter, his first cousin Princess Xenia, at Frogmore House, together with her numerous family and retinue, twenty-two persons in all. At that
Archive · Books · Mores · Humour
If we are to believe L.J. Clairian's "Researches and Medical Considerations on Men's Clothing" of 1803, this is what proper men's underwear ought to look like. Many authors would later cite his assertion on the harm of overly tight pantaloons, and
The East · Observations · Mores · Nature · Ethnography
A man in Turkish dress feeds stray cats and dogs with meat. Anyone who has been to Istanbul in our own day knows that the tradition of kindness to animals lives on there still. Perhaps in someone's heart this picture will awaken mercy towards stray cats and dogs
Museums · Observations · Mores
The New Year holidays are coming, and the fussy are preparing to wrinkle their noses at festive suppers of egg and mayonnaise salads. Quite wrongly. In the early modern period eggs were so important an element of the feast that in the 18th century the table was adorned with a
Museums · Observations · Heritage · Mores
Yesterday I witnessed a flagrant incident: a society lady, moreover one connected with the museum community, twice knocked down barriers in a house museum, pushing her way into a roped-off dining room to photograph the furniture at closer range, and after brazenly walking into the area cordoned off from
NB! · Archive · Mores · People
Richard Strauss happily spends time with his family. To his left is his father, Franz Joseph; to his right, his son Franz and his mother, Josephine
Archive · Mores · Paris · People
Soon after emigrating from Russia, Ella Yuryevna Kagan married and became Elsa Triolet, moved to Paris, and in due course began making costume jewellery out of whatever came to hand (my greetings to a good dozen of the fashionable jewellers of today), even out of Metlakh tiles, the kind used
NB! · Art · Books · Mores · Humour
Aristocracy · Mores · People · Pop Culture
Meet Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis, née Countess von Schönburg-Glauchau. A great many nineteenth-century novels began with this very plot: a girl from an impoverished noble family marries a wealthy man much older than herself... In 1980 the dutiful Catholic Gloria agreed to become the wife of
Art · Observations · Mores · Humour
Thanks to Gesina ter Borch, an artist of the Dutch Golden Age, for an idea on how to save on a pram. Gesina drew the woman with two children in a carrying basket in 1651, when she herself was about 20 years old. Own up, whom did these realities of