Archive · Books · Museums · Science · People · Saint Petersburg
The Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences announces the long-awaited acquisition of Vladimir Nabokov's Swiss archive, after three years of preparatory work and colossal logistics. The archive amounts to as many as 300 boxes of documents, manuscripts and texts. To be
Archive · Moscow · Society · People
Stalin in the Kremlin in August 1941, when he learned of the German advance on Kyiv. The photograph was taken by Boris Burkov, editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and preserved in defiance of an order to destroy the frame as showing the leader in an unflattering light. It is
Observations · People · Humour
Can we agree that the American swimmer and twenty-three-time Olympic champion Michael Phelps, upon receiving his thirteenth gold medal back in 2016, broke the absolute Olympic record of the ancient Greek athlete Leonidas of Rhodes, who over four Olympic Games (164 to 152 BC) emerged the victor twelve
Observations · Science · People
On 25 July 1984 Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman on planet Earth to walk in open space, for 3 hours 34 minutes. The flight itself, in July 1984, lasted 11 days 19 hours 14 minutes 36 seconds. She returned from space with a second Gold Star of a Hero
Interviews · Books · London · Monarchies · Observations · People
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, photographed by Holly Fernando for The Telegraph. From the interview we learn that she is now the author of 77 books (for children) and has at last written a novel for adults, Heart for a Compass, about the vicissitudes of court life in the Victorian
Faith · Art · Monarchies · Observations · People
Did you recognise her? I could not, without a prompt. The sublimely melancholy young woman in François Flameng's portrait of 1894 is a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, aged thirty, the elder sister of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich: Grand Duchess Elizabeth
Observations · Society · People
Alla Demidova on Ships and Their Names:. For more than forty years now I have watched this picture from my dacha window, as the ships sail past. We had a game: who could make out a name first. Little by little I grasped a certain regularity: the two-deckers were
Archive · Books · Mores · People
Many Tolstoys, for understandable reasons, do not care for Chertkov, the closest friend, confidant, fellow thinker and comrade-in-arms of Lev Nikolayevich. To appreciate Chertkov's place in Tolstoy's life, it is enough to recall that their correspondence fills five volumes of Tolstoy's collected
Aristocracy · Art · Science · People
Portrait of the French Aristocrat, Industrialist and Scientist Armand de Gramont, Duc de Guiche (1879-1962) Artist: Philip de László
Monarchies · Paris · People
at the time of his victory in the election of France's first president on 10 December 1848 // at the time of the coup d'état of 2 December 1851
Faith · London · Mores · People · Humour
According to Thomas Fuller, on 13 July 1586 the venerable 69-year-old clergyman Alexander Nowell invented bottled beer (or ale), having found at his favourite fishing spot a stoppered bottle that he had left there in the grass several days earlier. On opening the bottle, Nowell discovered that the
Archive · London · Monarchies · Science · People
Yury Gagarin's triumphal reception in England: jubilant crowds in Manchester and London, an exchange of courtesies with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at the Admiralty, and a reception at Buckingham Palace with Elizabeth II. As shown on British television