NB! · Cinema · People · Pop Culture · Humour

Who would have thought it: the beauty Milla Jovovich is 46 today!

Who would have thought it: the beauty Milla Jovovich is 46 today! And yet she remains the exact contemporary of her Leeloo and her Joan of Arc

London · Monarchies · Mores · People

Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and the Romanovs at Frogmore House under George V

There is a story about Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and her life in emigration. After the death of her own aunt, Maria Feodorovna, George V installed her daughter, his first cousin Princess Xenia, at Frogmore House, together with her numerous family and retinue, twenty-two persons in all. At that

The East · Observations · Society · People

So, on the subject of gender, nationality and politics

So, on the subject of gender, nationality and politics. Kazakhstan is issuing commemorative collector's coins with face values of 100, 500 and 5000 tenge bearing the image of Nursultan Nazarbayev. The inscription on the coins reads: independent Kazakhstan, 30 years. Of course, in Cyrillic the phrase would look

A dark double-breasted coat with a fur collar on a stand, a cane beside it and a metal bed frame at right, in a museum interior.

NB! · Books · Museums · Paris · People

Marcel Proust's coat shown at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris for the writer's 150th anniversary

Marcel Proust's fur-collared overcoat. It can be seen at the exhibition marking the writer's 150th anniversary at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris

Handwritten French manuscript page with numbered thoughts, including entries on the aim of humanity and on world history.

Books · People · Humour

The Thoughts of Young Gustave Flaubert on Human Suffering and World History

VII I expect every possible evil from men. VIII I believe that mankind pursues only one aim: to suffer. IX World history is a farce Thoughts of the young Gustave Flaubert

NB! · Archive · Books · People

"I feel more attached to my dog than to any human being", from the notes of the twenty-year-old Gustave Flaubert, who turns two hundred today

NB! · Archive · Art · Books · People

The Finnish writer, artist and creator of the Moomin universe Tove Jansson (1914–2001) in the studio at her home, 1956

NB! · Archive · Mores · People

Richard Strauss Happily Spends Time with His Family

Richard Strauss happily spends time with his family. To his left is his father, Franz Joseph; to his right, his son Franz and his mother, Josephine

Archive · Mores · Paris · People

The director Vasily Katanyan has a recollection that links Elsa Triolet, her sister Lilya Brik and Marina Tsvetaeva through Yelena, the wife of the literary scholar Tager

Soon after emigrating from Russia, Ella Yuryevna Kagan married and became Elsa Triolet, moved to Paris, and in due course began making costume jewellery out of whatever came to hand (my greetings to a good dozen of the fashionable jewellers of today), even out of Metlakh tiles, the kind used

NB! · People · Pop Culture · Saint Petersburg

Sophie Marceau and the Church of the Saviour on Blood

NB! · Archive · Art · People

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) and Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

NB! · Faith · Observations · People