Society - The Parnassian (Page 8)

NB! · Museums · Heritage · Society

The first to tell the gendarmerie about yesterday's robbery of the Lalique Museum was not the security firm but the cleaning lady

NB! · Moscow · Observations · Society · Humour

While Nobody Was Looking, the Toilers of Moscow's Municipal Budgetary Institutions from Central Asia Have Begun to Be Replaced by Specialists from Sunny Hindustan

While nobody was looking, the toilers of Moscow's municipal budgetary institutions (the GBU) from Central Asia have begun to be replaced by specialists from sunny Hindustan. The new ethnogeopolitical realities of our courtyard

NB! · Society · Humour

Macron Was Not Prepared for the Swedes to Take a Baguette Hostage

Coming Up · London · Museums · Society · Ethnography

The British Museum Opens a Most Interesting Exhibition on the USA

The British Museum has opened a most interesting exhibition on the USA. It is not, however, a parade of panegyrics for the 250th anniversary of the United States, but a reminder that many indigenous peoples were not at all delighted by American independence. Although the exhibition, Declaring Independence: USA 250,

Art · Museums · Heritage · Society · Paris

Klaus Kallmann, aged 98, has spent nine years suing the Musée d'Orsay in Paris over Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting "The Hospital Saint-Paul at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence"

Kallmann insists that he remembers it from childhood on the wall of his grandfather's villa, and that the Nazis plundered the family collection, which means the canvas belongs to him. The plaintiff's grandfather, Felix Kallmann, was a Berlin lawyer and collector who ran a lamp company

Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Society · Nature

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention?

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention? The destruction, for instance, of the thickets of an invasive species, Sakhalin

Observations · Society · Humour

Russia is a huge cart, dragged along a wretched road by scrawny nags: the officialdom

Russia is a huge cart, dragged along a wretched road by scrawny nags: the officialdom. On the cart sit the common folk and public figures, cursing the authorities for all they are worth and blaming them for the bad road. It is these gentlemen who ought to be taken off

Cinema · Books · Observations · Society · Humour

Among the presidential instructions following the meeting of the Council for Culture there turned up a touching one:

The Government of the Russian Federation, jointly with the Ministry of Justice of Russia, is to consider the question of drafting regulatory legal acts aimed at granting cultural organisations the right to use works created by outstanding Russian authors in cases of unjustified refusal by rights holders to grant such

Art · Society · Pop Culture · Humour

In the small hours of Monday, Donald Trump posted an image of a very strange painting, captioned "Great painting!!" and without the artist's name

The canvas heaps together George Washington, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, an astronaut on the Moon, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and Trump himself, along with a woman sewing a flag by candlelight, a boy with an elderly man in period dress, and a humanoid robot

Archive · Books · Moscow · Observations · Society

At the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Deputy Minister of Culture Zhanna Alexeyeva announced that a closed repository for literature of a "destructive nature" is being created at the Lenin Library, and called it a "spetskhran"

First of all, it must be explained at once that the spetskhran has existed in the Lenin Library all along; nobody abolished this department with the collapse of the USSR, it was merely the regime of access and the principle by which it is filled that changed. Pornographic and extremist

Faith · Observations · Education · Society

The Texas Board of Education has added biblical texts to the compulsory school reading list

The Texas Board of Education has added biblical texts to the compulsory school reading list. Pupils from the earliest grades through to the 12th will read the stories of Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, and extracts from the New Testament. I consider it a splendid neighbourhood for Dickens'

Archive · Moscow · Society · Humour

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody: Peter I's decree "On Maintaining Cleanliness in Moscow": still in force