Art · Observations · Humour

Medieval image of a woman hammering infants on an anvil personifies Nature

The popular medieval scene of a woman pounding infants laid on an anvil with a blacksmith's hammer is in fact a personification of Nature, who gives birth to children in her forge. She is merely giving her offspring the proper shape, so there is nothing to gawp at

NB! · Observations

What a Beautiful Day, Is It Not?

NB! · Art · Observations · Humour

Why do all the sitters in the paintings of the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken have the same face, just like Moscow's party girls?

NB! · Aristocracy · Observations · Humour

The Rothschilds aren't all that rich, believe me: I once saw them playing two to a single piano

Architecture · Observations · Ethnography · Humour

If you wish to delight your beloved in the house with the carved front garden, do memorise the proper names of the parts of a window surround

Sit down and learn them; I shall return and test you

NB! · Observations · Society

The Best So Far on the Speed at Which Unreliable Information Travels

Observations · Mores · Society · Humour

American economist Steven Levitt is convinced that the girls' names Angel, Heaven, Misty, Destiny and Tiffany, and the boys' names Billy, Tommy and Ricky, point to very poorly educated white parents

A good education, by contrast, and the influence of literature and art on parents are attested by such names in their children as Beckett, Sasha, Finnegan, Maira, Beatrix and Aviva. First, forgive me, Tiffany. Second, let us recall what the heroes of the highest-grossing Hollywood films of recent decades

Cinema · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour

29 years of Absolutely Fabulous, whose first episode aired on the BBC on 12 November 1992

How does a fashion show differ from a war? In an army, not every detachment has a Yasmin Le Bon, generals are not obliged to embrace everyone after each manoeuvre, and operations are not conducted to the beat of rap and avant-garde music. Many people's notions of

Books · Observations · Humour

Sumarokov condemned loanwords, while Trediakovsky derived the word amazon from omuzhonka

If Sumarokov railed against borrowings and called for the extermination of foreign words, declaring: "Foreign words are strange in conversation, stranger still in writing, and strangest of all in print. What will posterity say?", then his contemporary Vasily Trediakovsky, by contrast, found borrowings interesting and endowed them with

Books · Observations · People

It turns out that the real name of the writer and playwright Ludmila Petrushevskaya is Dolores

Ludmila Stefanovna relates that children bullied her over this name, and at the age of 15 she asked her mother to change it. She had always called herself Lyusya, and so she became Ludmila. Given the truly fantastic biography of this living Russian classic, I have no difficulty in believing

NB! · Books · Observations · People

Incidentally, one fact is often left out of the account: the younger sister of Lilya Brik (1891-1978) was another remarkable woman of the twentieth century, the writer Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), wife of Louis Aragon

NB! · Observations · Humour