Art · Monarchies · People
Jacques-Louis David, 1807. Sketch for the portrait of Napoleon in his coronation robes. On Napoleon's head is the golden wreath made for his coronation on 2 December 1804 by the jeweller Martin-Guillaume Biennais. The laurel wreath points us to Napoleon's favourite style, the antique.
Architecture · Museums · Heritage · People
An empty desk in the director's study of the A.S. Griboyedov "Khmelita" State Historical, Cultural and Natural Museum-Reserve, at which Viktor Kulakov worked. Today Viktor Evgenyevich Kulakov passed away. He was a unique man who will remain in our memory and in the history
Art · Monarchies · People · Humour
The Old Man Overstayed His Welcome. Eugène Delacroix, 1855. The painting shows the fifteenth-century Venetian Doge Francesco Foscari, who ruled longer than any other doge: 34 years. Foscari had a most interesting biography, but the choicest episode is this: by then he had become so thoroughly sick to death
Archaeology · Books · Mores · People
In 1902 Rudyard Kipling bought, at a bargain price, an ancient house near the hamlet of Burwash in Sussex. The road to the house ran over a high hill, and to climb it a carriage needed a second horse harnessed on, which did little for the property's appeal
Museums · Science · People
In Russia there is only one instrument by the celebrated mathematician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708): the burning lens from a device acquired by the Academy of Sciences in the early 1700s. Until 1947 the lens was kept in the museum of the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy
Cinema · Observations · People · Humour
The French pioneering film epic "Napoléon" of 1927 is an unrecognised masterpiece of silent cinema. Perhaps the film would be better known if it did not run for five hours, and if it bore at least some resemblance to historical fact. The picture is so far removed from
Cinema · People · Pop Culture
The last living Hollywood screen diva of the 1930s, Olivia de Havilland, has turned 103. Olivia is a two-time Oscar winner and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Incidentally, she is also the last surviving actress of "Gone with the Wind". In 2018
Faith · Science · People
In the reasoning of the French monk and, strange to say, philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), the idea of preformation is presented with some interest. Malebranche held that every living creature is, from the very beginning, contained in the egg of its mother. In the embryo of a tulip bulb
Archive · The East · Art · People
A miniature of 1635, sold twice at Sotheby's: twenty years ago and again last year. All this time the man in the portrait remained unknown: he was thought to be from Abyssinia or North Africa. Imagine the astonishment of the owners of this trifle when it emerged that
Archaeology · Museums · Science · People
The renowned Bigfoot and ancient hominid researcher, cryptozoologist, anthropologist, evolutionist, university lecturer, writer and simply a most original man, Grover Krantz, bequeathed his body to science. Krantz, who was seventy and dying of cancer, approached his colleague David Hunt, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, shortly before his death, asking
Archive · Moscow · Society · People
In 1920 Alexandra Tolstaya, daughter of Leo Tolstoy, was arrested on a charge of involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation and sentenced to three years' confinement in a concentration camp at the Novospassky Monastery in Moscow. She wrote: “My father, whose views I share, openly denounced the Tsarist government
Archive · Monarchies · Society · People
The admirers of Ferdinand VII could, of course, have known that while they fought for his freedom under the slogans «God. Fatherland. King», their dearly beloved ruler was heartily congratulating Napoleon on his victories on the Spanish front. The Otechestvennye zapiski of 1868 offered a rather pithy characterisation of Ferdinand: