Monarchies · Mores · People · Humour
There is an amusing sketch of Napoleon's mother. A woman of peculiar temperament, she had in her day flatly refused to live at the Trianon; the life of the court held no interest for her and she passed her time in rather secluded fashion, even declining to attend
Museums · Mores · Humour
In the early twentieth century a poor but resourceful American had no teeth, so he melted down two toothbrushes, shaped the plastic as required and made himself a new set of jaws with coyote teeth. When, in the 1940s, a professional dentist heard the inventor's story, he offered
NB! · Archive · Observations · Mores · New York · Pop Culture
The NYTimes has recently published a selection of Bill Cunningham's photographs of New York's Easter parades, which ran in Sunday Styles from 1997 to 2007. A time to which one would truly like to return 🌧💖
Art · Observations · Mores · Saint Petersburg
I do not know which came first, the roast chicken or the boiled egg, but pastry in the shape of letters is the very same alphabet biscuit from your childhood breakfasts, only larger and richer. In Germany today such baked goods are sometimes called Russisch Brot, supposedly because the Dresden
Art · Books · Mores
Ever heard of candaulism? It is a psychopathological syndrome manifesting itself in the desire to show strangers the nakedness of one's partner. In our own day, this pathology is not infrequently encountered on Instagram. Yet as early as 1646 one could learn of such a deviation from the
Aristocracy · Monarchies · Mores · Society Pages
After the wedding ceremony on 14 May 1962, the Greek princess Sophia and the Spanish prince Juan Carlos (the future King and Queen of Spain) set off for the royal palace in Athens in a carriage drawn by six horses. The carriage is a far from ordinary one: it was
Archaeology · Faith · Mores · Ethnography
To cure an ailment, take a little water and mix it with plain... ...grave dust. Bede the Venerable writes of Saint Chad, Chad of Mercia, a bishop who lived in the seventh century and was canonised soon after his death, that dust from his grave was held to be miraculous
Cinema · Monarchies · Mores · People
On 24 April 1671 the outstanding French maître d'hôtel, restaurateur, impresario and founder of catering, François Vatel, brought his life's journey to an end. Vatel's name has become a byword for restaurateurs and chefs the world over: the man was so devoted to his
Observations · Mores · Humour
I have two questions: when did you last go hunting, and do you know how to make a pigeon pie? It is no simple matter. Ingredients: 12 pigeon breasts, 450 g mushrooms, a few truffles, 12 quail eggs, salt, pepper, cloves and nutmeg, herbs, 1 glass of port, 1 glass
Books · Mores · People
Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims / Fruits of Solitude. William Penn, 1693
Observations · Mores
Bathing machines are naturally an invention of the English. At the end of the eighteenth century, the champions of piety devised this way for women to enjoy the sea without loss of dignity or visible propriety. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of Victorianism, machines for
Aristocracy · Faith · Monarchies · Mores
In the late eighteenth century, marriages to foreigners, male and female, were all the rage among the Russian nobility, and the partners from abroad were at times not representatives of the hereditary aristocracy at all, neither counts nor even barons, but merely French émigrés or Italian singers. With the marriage