In the Press - The Parnassian (Page 9)

In the Press · Books · Observations

The Parnassian Mockingbird Turns 6!

In all these years I could count on one hand the days when I failed to post in the Mockingbird. It is not merely a community of cultural history or some new medium: the Parnassian Mockingbird has become a self-sufficient intellectual phenomenon with a style, a character and a

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You Must Put Up With Her for Another Five Years

You must put up with her for another five years. The front-page headline of the Daily Mirror after Margaret Thatcher was elected for a third term as Prime Minister in 1987. The forecast, incidentally, proved wrong: the Iron Lady resigned in 1990

Errata page of an old Russian book with corrections to page 82, replacing concealers of runaway slaves with kidnappers.

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An errata list advises replacing negative growth with the word decline

Printed: negative growth. To be read: a fall.

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Amelia Windsor writes for Tatler on the couture history of the House of Dior

On the English-language Tatler website a long piece on the couture history of the House of Dior has appeared, written by Amelia Windsor, granddaughter of the Duke of Kent. Amelia is not merely forty-second in line to the English throne: she combines modelling with editorial work at Tatler,

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Thank you to everyone who quotes me in Porto Alegre; do invite me to visit!

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Princess Margaret, aged 27, the Queen's younger sister, on the cover of Tatler

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London Evening News in 1959 on the Moskvich and the Volga, awarded the Grand Prix in Brussels

The Moskvich and the Volga in a 1959 London Evening News survey of Soviet cars. Despite the popularity of the GAZ-21 after the World Fair in Brussels, where our Volga won the Grand Prix and was declared the best car in Europe for 1958, the English newspaper does not

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Epiphany bathing in Saratov in 1949 and the feuilleton in the newspaper “Pravda”

Legendary images of Epiphany bathing in the Stalin era were printed in the country's main newspaper. In 1949 the feast of the Epiphany in Saratov became the subject of a satirical feuilleton in Pravda; the mocking piece dwells on stories of those who fell ill with pneumonia after

In the Press · Art · Observations · Paris · Humour

After the first Impressionist exhibition, a journalist from Le Figaro wrote that the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Morisot and Sisley made him think of a monkey to whom the public ought to present a basket of flowers

Evidently, this was an allusion to Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps's painting "The Monkey Painter" of 1833. Nearly 150 years have passed since that exhibition, and with every private view new talented primates remain in the shadow of their many masterpieces. It must be said, though, that the

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Someone will object that the freedom to talk nonsense is not the same thing as freedom of speech, but according to the newspaper Metro, people refuse to accept that the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is not a nineteenth-century cross-dressing prosti

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Pope Francis today addressed listeners of BBC Radio with an appeal to the world leaders gathered at the climate summit in Glasgow: "Each of us, whoever we are and wherever we are, can play a part in changing our collective response to the unprecedented th

Pope Francis today addressed listeners of BBC Radio with an appeal to the world leaders gathered at the climate summit in Glasgow: "Each of us, whoever we are and wherever we are, can play a part in changing our collective response to the unprecedented threat of climate change and

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Modern Romanovs and their claims to the Russian throne under pre-revolutionary law

The wedding of Georgy Mikhailovich Romanov has caused a great commotion, and waves of displeasure and outrage are still spreading across the windless surface of our infosphere. Characteristically, I have had messages from people among my acquaintances, even ones permitted to follow me on Insta, saying that all of us