Aristocracy · Mores · People · Pop Culture
Meet Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis, née Countess von Schönburg-Glauchau. A great many nineteenth-century novels began with this very plot: a girl from an impoverished noble family marries a wealthy man much older than herself... In 1980 the dutiful Catholic Gloria agreed to become the wife of
Cinema · People · Pop Culture
Today we lost one of the brightest actresses of Soviet theatre and cinema, a beauty, a lyrical heroine and a refined, cultivated woman: Nina Urgant. Nina Nikolayevna passed away in her 93rd year. Naturally, everyone has now recalled the song that became a beloved anthem of the whole nation, "
Moscow · Observations · Society · People
Today is the birthday of Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov (1896-1974) When Zhukov died, his family appealed to the country's supreme leadership to have his body committed to the earth, as the Marshal of Victory himself had wished, but in vain: he was cremated, and his ashes were
NB! · Archive · People
Tsypkin's photograph from the Tsarist Okhrana file. Tsypkin, Israel-Leizer Wulfovich. Card from the case file on the surveillance by the Tsarist secret police of certain Russian political figures. The photograph was certified by two police officers in his presence on 18 June 1916
NB! · Monarchies · People · Pop Culture
Yves Saint Laurent, 1980. Photograph by Lord Snowdon, brother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II and husband of her younger sister Princess Margaret, Antony Armstrong-Jones
Books · Mores · People
The fundamental principle of the intelligentsia's ethos is intellectual freedom, freedom as a moral category. The only things from which a cultured person is not free are his own conscience and his own thought. Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev, “Letters on the Good and the Beautiful”.
Aristocracy · Art · Books · Museums · People
In the late 1790s the celebrated Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun worked in Russia, painting august portraits and persons of the very highest rank, such as the last King of Poland; she devoted a separate part of her memoirs to the Russian period, and it has been published in Russian. The
Books · Paris · People
The French writer Louise de Vilmorin
Faith · Society · People · Rome
CBS has aired a report on a miracle attributed to Pope Francis. A 10-year-old boy suffering from autism and epilepsy ran up onto the stage to the Pope and began to talk with the pontiff. For his mother, it was already a miracle that her son had climbed
Books · Science · People · Saint Petersburg
Vasily Adodurov, Adjunct of the Academy of Sciences and a contemporary of Lomonosov, played a weighty part as early as the 1730s in establishing the norms of Russian orthography. True, many of his ideas were too progressive and remained no more than a project. He thought it sensible to rid
NB! · Archive · Books · Paris · People · Humour
Archaeology · The East · Mores · People
Everyone, no doubt, remembers Agatha Christie's remark that it is good to be an archaeologist's wife, since the older a woman grows, the more interesting he finds her. Sophia Schliemann would perhaps have added: and besides, one may wear the freshly discovered treasures. In 1874 Sophia,