NB! · Aristocracy · Archive · Mores · Humour

Princess Diana's younger brother has published a photograph from 1 July 1967, when, for Diana's sixth birthday party, their father, Earl Spencer, delighted the children by inviting Bert the camel from Peterborough Zoo to the estate

Brass helmet topped with a gilded crowned double-headed eagle, with a star badge and a colored rosette on the side. It stands on a wooden block against a grey background.

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Ceremonial helmet with a gilded double-headed eagle on a wooden stand

NB! · Art · Nature

Mantises, Justin Wood, 2022

NB! · Geography · Maps · Books

A Map of the World According to Homer

NB! · Cinema · Society · Pop Culture

The Soyuzmultfilm film studio files an application to register the trademark “Chebubu” to protect the image of Cheburashka

Rotated book page with a tree diagram: Proto-Slavic splits into West Slavic and South-East Slavic branches, with Polish, Czech, Russian, Serbian and other languages.

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Family tree of the Slavic languages in a book with pre-reform spelling

NB! · Archive · Architecture · Rome

Greco-Roman Wrestling Among the Ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome, 1960

Black-and-white photograph of several boys in shorts lying on a granite plinth beside a large flower urn, with a square and a metro station building behind.

NB! · Archive · Moscow · Observations

Children Sunbathing at the Arbatskaya Metro Station Entrance in Moscow in the 1960s

Children sunbathing near Arbatskaya metro station in the 1960s. Consider how much more human and simple life in Moscow was sixty years ago. Today the city is deprived of such ordinary joys, yet it is drowning in formal conveniences

NB! · Archive · Observations

The Ingenious Infographics of the Nineteenth Century

NB! · Society · Paris · Humour

A brazier in the shape of the Eiffel Tower: our answer to Macron

A blue drilling rig stands on a blue pontoon raft on the canal, with historic buildings and construction cranes on the embankment.

NB! · Moscow · Observations

Drilling rig on a pontoon raft on the Vodootvodny Canal by Bolotnaya Embankment

A floating drilling rig on a pontoon raft on the Vodootvodny Canal, on the Bolotnaya Embankment side, between the Patriarshy Bridge (closed) and the Maly Kamenny Bridge. What are they drilling for? I have grown curious.

NB! · Archive · Architecture · Moscow · Heritage

Such a combination of the incompatible: the gates of a nineteenth-century Moscow estate and the signboard of the Red Rubber factory. On the grounds of this property on Plyushchikha, a factory club to a design by Konstantin Melnikov would be built in 1929