NB! · Faith · The East · Observations · Society · Humour
Trump was deified in India on the eve of his visit to the country in early 2020. I understand, of course, that Hinduism is the closest living equivalent of the Hellenic religion, and that the Romans never missed a chance to admit new gods and fold them into their worldview.
Books · Society · People
Do not wait for catastrophe. It has already happened. Alexander Zinoviev (1922-2006)
Cinema · Observations · Education · Society · Pop Culture
School uniform conforming to the new GOST, developed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade together with the Ministry of Education, looks like clothing from Soviet cinema of the 1950s. Indeed, the burgundy suit with skirt and jacket prescribed for girls, complemented by a lace tie-cum-jabot, is more
Books · Society
I took a book, risen from my sleep, And read in it: "There have been worse times, But none more base" I flung the book far from me. Can it be that you and I Are sons of such an age, O friend and reader mine?.. Literal translation
Books · Heritage · Society
The answer is very simple: the preservation of holdings. Between 2022 and 2023, a number of European countries recorded cases of rare antiquarian editions disappearing from public and university libraries. Among the lost copies are first editions published in the lifetimes of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Shevchenko, Kruchenykh and other authors
Archaeology · Geography · Observations · Society
The El Silar Complex in Bolivia Looks Just as the Splendid Achievements of Past Civilisations Do in the Perspective of Our Own Day. Have you ever driven past a ruined Sovkhoz or an abandoned factory? Many of the everyday phenomena of the developed past, seen through the sad prism of
Books · Society · Humour
Counterfeiting in the antiquarian book market reaches a new level: outright forgeries presented as collectors' rarities, "manufactured" (!) in a single copy. At the end of the advertisement the entrepreneur adds: We have hundreds of digitised autographs of celebrities of the 19th to 21st centuries, and will produce
Geography · Observations · Society · Humour
Remember how, in 2015, the head of Russian Railways proposed building a super-highway from London to New York across the whole of Eurasia and North America, to include a railway, a motorway and oil pipelines? The project was called the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development, but the prospect of its
Museums · Heritage · Society · Paris
The French government has presented a bill intended to simplify the restitution to their countries of origin of works of art removed in the colonial era, reports Artguide. If the law is adopted, the process of returning objects from France's national collections that originate from states which lost
NB! · Observations · Society · Humour
Cinema · Society
The decision to ban a film will be taken by the ministry jointly with Roskomnadzor, and the owners of online platforms will be obliged to remove such content within twenty-four hours. The law also empowers the ministry to rewrite distribution certificates already issued, and now without any request from
Books · Monarchies · Heritage · Society
In 1722 Peter I introduced a special mass-produced form of state insignia, the Zertsalo, which remained an obligatory attribute of the institutions of the Russian Empire until 1917. The symbol of the supremacy of law took the form of a wooden prism with three panels, crowned with the state