NB! · The East · Cinema · Observations · Humour

The bishop's tent and the whole setting of the scene before the Russian host's battle with the Livonian dog-knights in the film "Alexander Nevsky" recall the pavilions of the Saracens, especially as the snow looks rather more like sand

NB! · Observations

As They Say, I Wish You All of It!

Archive · Cinema · Moscow · Observations · Society · Paris

Children wiping car windows at a Moscow intersection, as in 1990s films

Little Street Musicians of Montmartre, 1937. Remember how, in the films of the 1990s, children earning a living on city streets by washing car windscreens at junctions and selling chewing gum and flowers were a common sight? Then they vanished from view for a while, as the economic situation changed.

Observations · Education · Society · Humour

As They Used to Say at School: Now a Question to Catch You Out

By way of illustrating the fruits of the finest education in the world, after ten or twenty years of the nosediving standards of television and the media

Observations · Mores · People · Humour

Sarah Bernhardt at Thirty, in Her Coffin

She is not dead. Merely asleep. Or rather, posing for a photograph in the character of a woman lying in a coffin. She died, after all, at 78. Until then she simply liked to lie in a coffin. And she had one installed at home as a bed. A fool

Faith · Books · London · Observations · People

Thomas Eliot and Virginia Woolf were friends for over twenty years, but when Eliot embraced Christianity, or rather, after a period of open hostility to the Church, gradually became a zealous believer, Woolf said: he is dead to all of us

Thomas Eliot and Virginia Woolf were friends for over twenty years, but when Eliot embraced Christianity, or rather, after a period of open hostility to the Church, gradually became a zealous believer, Woolf said: he is dead to all of us. She called his faith in God and the immortality

Art · Museums · Observations · Mores

The "Russian Incredible" exhibition has many paintings before which one stops with a lungful of air

But the painting "Aunt Sasha" by David Petrovich Shterenberg simply will not let go. From the collection of the State Russian Museum. 1922-1923. The Civil War has only just ended. Before us sits a Russian village woman in a cornflower-blue headscarf and blouse. She is no

In the Press · Art · London · Observations

Jo Vickery on the results of 2024 in the Russian art market in London

“For three years now London has held no Russian sale, the famous auction that had existed in one form or another since the late 1980s. It was a golden age: the descendants of Russian émigrés and celebrities such as Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya, or Prince and Princess Michael of

Black-and-white photo of a woman with wet hair screaming in a shower, holding a smaller photo of a screaming woman against the tiled wall.

Cinema · Observations · Pop Culture

Jamie recreates a frame from the shower scene in “Psycho”, shot over a week in 70 takes

Wow, I had no idea that Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the actress from "Psycho", and Tony Curtis, the actor from "Some Like It Hot" In this photograph Jamie poses in imitation of the shot from the shower scene in "Psycho&

Architecture · Observations · Pop Culture · Society Pages

Since we are speaking of luxurious interiors today, here is another, in Ulyana Sergeenko's new "Orient Express" boutique

Since we are speaking of luxurious interiors today, here is another, in Ulyana Sergeenko's new "Orient Express" boutique. There is a great deal of polish and lacquered surface, magnificent work with veneer, combined with generous draping in velvet and vintage lighting: Murano chandeliers and vintage Art

Observations · Science · Pop Culture · Humour

Kate Bush in a 1979 Photograph by Claude Vanheye and the Story of Wilhelm Reich

Kate Bush, photographed by the Dutch photographer Claude Vanheye in a car park in Amsterdam in 1979. The crocodile is not real. I know nothing about Kate Bush, except that she is a singer and in her day made, together with Terry Gilliam and some celebrated actors, a video for

Coming Up · Faith · Art · Museums · Observations

Near Oryol, at the Turgenev Museum-Reserve Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, the exhibition "Invisible Threads

Near Oryol, at the Turgenev Museum-Reserve Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, the exhibition "Invisible Threads. Christian and Historical Subjects in the Work of Russian Artists" is open until 30 March. A rare opportunity to see masterpieces of Russian art in regional museum halls. The exhibition presents works by Repin, Vasnetsov,