Archive · Books · Mores · People

Trial of 13-year-old Fyodor Reshetnikov over a lost packet containing a manifesto

How a Lost Piece of Post Brought a Future Writer before the Court. The biography of the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Reshetnikov (1841-1871) began in a most unusual fashion: with a long and complicated trial in which he stood as a mere child. Reshetnikov was brought before the court at

NB! · Archive · Books · People

Vladimir Nabokov on the terrace of the luxurious Montreux Palace hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva, 1970

NB! · London · Monarchies · People · Society Pages

Queen Elizabeth II at the Ascot races, 16 June 1961

An elderly man in a dark suit rests his hands on a red carpet while a man in a white captain's cap helps him.

NB! · Monarchies · People · Humour

King Harald V of Norway, aged 86, fell but got up and went on his way

King Harald V of Norway, 86, has had a fall. But he got up and carried on

NB! · Books · People · Nature

Mark Twain and Cats

NB! · Archive · Art · People

Valentin Serov at the Age of 8

Art · Museums · People

Repin's last self-portrait of 1920 and the artist's hard life in Kuokkala

Repin painted his last self-portrait in 1920, at the age of 76. Those years proved a very hard time in his life. His wife had been dead for some years, and for some years he had been cut off from family and friends by borders: after the revolution the

Archive · Art · Museums · People

Repin's studio in his house and his Sunday drawing despite doctors' advice

"...I love art more than virtue, more than people, than my nearest and dearest, than my friends, more than any happiness or joys of our life," from Ilya Repin's letter to the art critic Stasov. In this studio on the first floor of his house Repin

Architecture · Museums · Mores · People

Dining table with a rotating central section at Repin's Penaty estate

Ilya Repin and his wife Natalia Nordman devised an unusual table for their house in the village of Kuokkala, which allowed everyone to sit down to dinner in comfort and required no servants at the feast. This remarkable table, far ahead of its time, had two parts: a moving one

Archive · Education · People

The Kerensky and Lenin families were close in Simbirsk, but the sons recalled no meetings

Alexandr Fyodorovich Kerensky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin may have known each other from early childhood. Their fathers were friends and kept up a close relationship. Kerensky's father was the director of the Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium for Boys, from which Lenin graduated. When Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov died, Fyodor Mikhailovich

NB! · Faith · People · Rome · Humour

Asked by an Italian television presenter which programmes he enjoyed in his youth, Pope Francis, aged 86, replied: “I'll let you in on a secret

Asked by an Italian television presenter which programmes he enjoyed in his youth, Pope Francis, aged 86, replied: “I'll let you in on a secret. When I was young, we had no television.”

Books · Moscow · Observations · People · Humour

I wonder how people can find any interest in new books, when all the charm of life lies in old books and manuscripts alone!

A caricature of the Moscow collector Alexey Bakhrushin