Preserving culture is important for some people. Nationalists and patriots can get a little heavy-handed and tend not to accept cultures and traditions different from their own. However, smaller groups of humanity try to...
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Mikhail Nesterov, in Russian – Михаи́л Не́стеров – was born in 1862 into humble circumstances. As the son of a merchant Nesterov struggled to find joy in his father’s line of work. The life of...
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I’ve decided to write a short article on an impressive monument, area or natural wonder from every country in the world. I’m starting with Afghanistan, because there’s nothing quite like an alphabetised list of...
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Everyone likes a good practical joke (as long as it isn’t carried out on you and no one dies or ends up in a coma), the Germans call it schadenfreude – ‘pleasure derived from...
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William Cheselden was born on October 19, 1688 at Somerby, near Burrow-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire. He worked as an apprentice surgeon at St. Thomas’s Hospital where he fell deeply in love with bones. By 1711, he was...
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Kit Kats are a classic snack. I don’t know a single human being that wouldn’t happily slam one of those bad boys down their gullet, satiated or not. Today I came across the...
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Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was an incredible Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter (meaning “pictures of the floating world”) and printmaker of the Edo period. His most famous work is the The Great Wave off Kanagawa (above) which was...
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There have been plenty of striking dinosaurs clambering over this planet throughout the years. A newly discovered species – Qijianglong – is a particularly impressive beast. Its neck makes up more than half of its body length. In 2006,...
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The Physiologus is an ancient text, written somewhere between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. The book features drawings of animals, mythical and real, alongside short stories, explaining the animal’s general characteristics. The stories are designed...
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Jean Bourdichon (1457 or 1459 – 1521) was a miniature painter and manuscript illuminator at the court of France between the end of the 15th century and the start of the 16th. He...
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