Faith · People · Pop Culture · Rome · Humour
Yesterday evening the Pope slipped out of the Vatican and was caught leaving the StereoSound music shop near the Pantheon. Francis likes not only mischievous escapades but also classical music, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach above all, so why not combine the two passions, he thought? All the more so as
Archive · Architecture · People
Photographs of the Athenian Acropolis, 1930. The author is the German cameraman, director, artist and pioneer of German photography Walter Hege. The pictures, taken with an impressive focal length of 1200 mm, capture one of the chief temples of ancient Athens: the Erechtheion of the 400s BC, dedicated to Athena,
NB! · Monarchies · People · Humour
Archive · Books · Education · People
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien became a professor at Oxford at 30, and this is what the academic dress of a Doctor of Letters (DLitt) of the University of Oxford looks like: a scarlet gown with bell-shaped sleeves of grey silk. Tolkien received this honorary degree in 1972, a year
NB! · Art · Cinema · People
Faith · Observations · People · Rome
Not so long ago, 1 January was not a feast of the Mother of God. The Orthodox will grasp this perfectly: the Dormition of the Theotokos falls in August, her Nativity in September, the Protection of the Theotokos in October, and her Entry into the Temple in November. So what
NB! · Cinema · People · Pop Culture
On 1 January, three weeks short of her hundredth birthday, Betty White, star of The Golden Girls, died. She began her career as early as 1939, in the series The Merry Widow. Rest in peace
NB! · Cinema · Observations · People
This will be our first New Year without Andrei Myagkov, but with his film roles. The People's Artist of the RSFSR died in February 2021, in his 83rd year
Archive · Science · People
This is what one of the first X-ray images looks like, taken on 23 January 1896. Contrary to a misconception widespread on the internet, it is not a picture of the right hand of the wife of Wilhelm Röntgen, discoverer of the mysterious X-rays. It is a picture
Archive · Art · Observations · People
What do you make of these portraits? Little girls with improbably large butterflies. What is that, by the way, an Atlas moth? Such is the work of Joshua Johnson, the first successful Black American portraitist. Well, successful, and Black... Until the 1990s the identity of the author of at least
Books · Moscow · Museums · People
In this dress in 1936-37 Maria Petrovna Lilina, wife of Konstantin Stanislavsky, played Countess Vronskaya in the Moscow Art Theatre's production of "Anna Karenina". The dress was Lilina's personal property, part of her mother's legacy, brought from Paris in her youth,
Art · People · Humour
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1881