NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Humour

Nicholas II at the Gym

Nicholas II at the gym. No, you're not seeing things

NB! · Observations

The One Day of the Year When I Allow Myself Not to Work Is My Birthday

NB! · Archive · Books · Education · People

Tolkien sketched Helm's Deep on a used examination paper

Tolkien sketched Helm's Deep on a used examination paper. He wrote the epic The Lord of the Rings while already a professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature at the University of Oxford

NB! · Art · People

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) and Alexander Tyshler (1898–1980)

NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Moscow · Mores

A chest with a roast ox and other provisions, uncovered and covered, set up along the route of Elizabeth Petrovna's ceremonial procession into Moscow on 28 February 1742

Dark cloth binding with gold lettering reading “Lev Tolstoy, volume 90”.

NB! · Books · Observations · Humour

Lev Tolstoy's complete works run to 90 volumes, Alexey Tolstoy's to 15

Leo Tolstoy's complete collected works run to 90 volumes. Alexey Tolstoy's, to 15. As the saying goes, who's going to give you more?

Stone mascaron head with bulging eyes, a large nose and curled moustache on a white plinth in a museum hall.

NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Museums

Stone mascaron with a moustache from an 18th-century Moscow house at the Museum of Moscow

A moustached mascaron from an eighteenth-century Moscow house. Museum of Moscow

Three white shell-shaped bowls on a red marble wall with dark veins. Overlaid text, in Russian, jokes about a date idea: renting the Hermitage to view all the paintings in silence.

NB! · Observations · Humour

Shell-shaped bowls against red marble with a joking caption about the Hermitage

Yes, of course. Hold your breath

NB! · Society

Fans Responded with the Roman Salute

NB! · Faith · Observations · Society

The Pope calls for the debts of poor countries to be forgiven, paradoxically supposing that this is a way of helping their development

The Pope calls for the debts of poor countries to be forgiven, paradoxically supposing that this is a way of helping their development. But economics, as it happens, is arranged a little differently

NB! · Art · People

Meditation, Thomas Bossard

NB! · Archive · Observations · Paris

Cover of "La Vie parisienne", 1923

Cover of La Vie parisienne, 1923. I can say that over a hundred years the content of Parisian life has changed considerably