Books · Monarchies · Observations · Humour

The English queen carries on with her book club, and this time recommends Gabriel García Márquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera"

The English queen carries on with her book club, and this time recommends Gabriel García Márquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera". Well, I hardly need explain what it was in the story of a feeling rekindled between two elderly former lovers that touched Camilla.

Books · Observations · Pop Culture

In his song, Butusov bids farewell to the America of westerns, Fenimore Cooper and Tom Sawyer

Have you ever wondered why, in that legendary song, Butusov bids farewell to America? And an America, moreover, where he has never been? He is not saying goodbye to the United States with its Statue of Liberty, or to the skyscrapers of New York. In fact the poet is taking

A cream retro-style car with a chrome grille and round headlights stands under a canopy in the light of sunset.

NB! · Cinema · Observations · Pop Culture

Retrofuturistic flying cars in the series Hello Tomorrow

Very impressed by the retro-futuristic flying machines in the series Hello Tomorrow. I should very much like to own such a luxurious motor

Art · London · Monarchies · Observations · Ethnography

The Green Man on the invitation and the origins of this motif in medieval art

The invitation to the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla is adorned with a pagan image of the Green Man. At the centre of the invitation sits the head of the Green Man, a widely known motif of medieval architecture, art and folklore. You will surely have seen,

Books · Monarchies · Moscow · Observations · Humour

Having breakfast at my beloved KM20 and delighting that a copy of unloved Prince Harry's book was a gift 🥰🥰 And wishing everyone a good morning 🌞 I set about reading at once, and so far these are not the worst memoirs I have come across

Not without oddities, though. On the very first page I opened there turned up an original passage in which Harry supposes that his DNA holds a rudimentary memory of the terrorist attack of 1979 in which Lord Mountbatten, his great-great-uncle, was killed

Coming Up · Art · Monarchies · Museums · Observations · Paris

Three portraits of Marie Antoinette by a single artist, the Swedish painter Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller

Marie Antoinette sat for Wertmüller in 1785-88. He worked on commission from the Swedish king Gustav III. Besides the portrait of the queen with her children, Antoinette appeared on several other canvases. The most intimate proved to be precisely the first version. This one, by all appearances, was never

Faith · Books · Observations · Society

In the Life of Andrew the Fool for Christ, known in Slavonic since the eleventh century

In the Life of Andrew the Fool for Christ, known in Slavonic since the 11th century and set in Byzantium in the 10th, we find these words: "In the last days the Lord God shall raise up a tsar from poverty.. he shall raise up the churches of the

NB! · Art · Books · Observations · People

Mood: Virginia Woolf in a Portrait by Bett Norris

Books · Observations · Humour

Critic Belinsky's assessment of Koltsov's poetry

He possesses a talent not great, but genuine; a gift of creation neither deep nor strong, but real and unforced. Belinsky on the poetry of Koltsov. Praise of a sort, yet somehow rather insulting

NB! · Observations · Society · Paris · Humour

Montparnasse Has Never Been as Beautiful as Under Macron

Archive · Museums · Observations · Society

A 1954 document on a reprimand for forgery as a possible exhibit for a Jewish Museum

I have in my possession a unique document in which a party commission examines the offence of a man who had, on his own authority, altered his nationality in his autobiography and personnel file from "Jewish" to "Russian", for himself and for his parents. Such is

Art · Monarchies · Observations · Humour

One must pay tribute to the skill of the French portraitist Louis Hersent

One must pay tribute to the skill of the French portraitist Louis Hersent. Maria Amalia of Naples, Queen of the French from 1830 to 1848, who, incidentally, fretted to her dying day that she had taken the place of the Bourbons, shown in a portrait of the 1840s and in