Society · Paris · People
Joan of Arc, during the failed siege of Paris in which she was wounded, kept food out of the city for almost 20 days, unembarrassed that she was starving and sickening the Parisians. Of course, this looks like a perfectly normal part of siege strategy. But the point lies not
Aristocracy · Monarchies · People
Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Alexander II, the last Queen of Romania. In furs. She wrote ardent letters to George V and Nicholas II and was a genuine celebrity of her day. To this woman the Entente owed Romania's abandonment of neutrality and its entry
Archive · Heritage · Society · People
The Social Democratic Party of Germany once assembled an impressive archive of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, comprising the extensive correspondence between Marx and Engels, other letters, and their manuscripts and notes. In 1933 the Russian historian Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevsky managed to get the party's archive out of
NB! · Archive · Books · Society · People
Stinking Democrats, cunning Communists, screeching liberals, idiots, suicides and thieves. Inna Lisnyanskaya on the events of October 1993, in a letter to her daughter
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Society · People
A little on how Gorbachev secured the Central Committee's "consent" to his decisions. From the memoirs of V. V. Grishin
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Society · People
NB! · Monarchies · Science · People
Vlad Dracula may have suffered from porphyria, a condition marked by both mental disorders and the appearance of blisters and sores on the skin after exposure to sunlight. Porphyria also afflicted George III and Mary Stuart
Monarchies · Mores · People
Alice Perrers was 36 years younger than her lover, Edward III. She twisted the king around her finger, sowed discord at court and, after the queen's death, in effect took her place; this troubled society and Parliament so greatly that it was resolved to remove Alice from court.
Archaeology · Moscow · Observations · Science · People
Today in Moscow we bade farewell to the distinguished scholar Ekaterina Georgievna Devlet. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Academic Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the Centre for Palaeoart, Professor Ekaterina Devlet was a leading specialist in early forms of art and in
Archive · Books · Mores · People
Turgenev described in some detail the madness of Pauline Viardot's eldest daughter Louise Héritte, who, instead of marrying the Frenchman with whom she was involved, married, against all persuasion, a certain Héritte and very soon came to hate him. Allegedly for his narrowness of mind. She bore a
Books · Education · People · Humour
John Milton, author of "Paradise Lost" and Foreign Secretary in Cromwell's government, was known during his student years at Cambridge (Christ's College) as the Lady of Christ's: he was long-haired, pale and languid, and sat under a tree in the Fellows&
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