Faience eggs, whole and cut, with orange yolks lie on a dish with a blue ornamental border.

NB! · Art · Observations · Humour

Faience eggs of the 18th century, whole and cut, on a dish with a blue border

Are you fond of eggs? And of faience ones? The eighteenth century: a love for all seasons

Painting of a preacher in a pulpit, a clerk with clasped hands below, and a sleeping woman in a red dress.

NB! · Faith · Art · Observations · Humour

Hogarth's “The Sleeping Congregation” of 1728, with a preacher resembling Desaguliers

The Sleeping Congregation, 1728. Hogarth. It is very Hogarthian that the man in the pulpit looks like the celebrated natural philosopher, propagandist of Newtonian theories and freemason John Theophilus Desaguliers. And the flock is asleep

NB! · Art · Observations

Portable boxes, no bigger than a matchbox

Portable boxes, no bigger than a matchbox. Silver, early nineteenth century. You may call them cocaine boxes, but I keep jewellery in them

In the Press · Books · Observations · Mores

What the antiques market sells as cocaine boxes and when cocaine became fashionable

Talking of the curious trifles of the past, people often mention cocaine boxes, and their existence surprises hardly anyone: well, what did folk not amuse themselves with in the old days. But if one looks into it, the end of the nineteenth century, say its second half, was nevertheless marked

A small pale figurine of Baubo with a tuft of hair on its head stands on a wooden shelf against a dark background.

NB! · Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Humour

Figurine of the ancient Greek Baubo in Freud's study

The aged ancient Greek libertine Baubo in Freud's consulting room. Nicely settled in

A wall with a deep crack spanned by a white measuring plate, with N17 02.04.18 handwritten beside it.

NB! · Observations · Education · Humour

Crack in a university wall in Russia fitted with a measuring plate

Dropped in at the university. In principle, that is all one needs to know about higher education in Russia.

NB! · Art · Observations · Humour

Goya's "Time" shows two old crones with the comic remains of youthful make-up and vacant stares, before the question "What's new?" The old girls plainly fail to notice the mythical creature behind their backs

NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Observations · People · Humour

An amusing photograph of Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald looking thoroughly ill at ease in court dress

An amusing photograph of Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald looking thoroughly ill at ease in court dress. Note in particular those wonderful little feet

NB! · Aristocracy · Architecture · Observations · Heritage

The grand staircase of Princess Olga Paley's neoclassical Palace in Tsarskoye Selo

The grand staircase of Princess Olga Paley's neoclassical Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. A Russian Trianon in utter dereliction, it now belongs, it seems, to some orthopaedic institute or other

NB! · Observations · Palaeontology · Nature

I looked back to see whether she had looked back, a she-bear Ursus spelaeus from the Ice Age, 14,000 years ago

NB! · Observations · Humour

Two-faced man holding a horn and a knife in a medieval manuscript miniature

Two faces, and both wearing that expression... God forbid, of course

Faith · Observations · Mores · Ethnography

In England there was a fortune-telling custom before Christmas or on St Thomas's Day: girls took three, five or eight onions and pierced them with pins, marking each with a special sign or initial standing for the names of the young men they had their eye

In England there was a fortune-telling custom before Christmas or on St Thomas's Day: girls took three, five or eight onions and pierced them with pins, marking each with a special sign or initial standing for the names of the young men they had their eye on,