danny
Dutch

Finding an affordable, respectable place to live in Georgian or Victorian London was ever a problem, and one which citizens could not escape even in death. Overpopulation of the city’s major graveyards caused public scandals due to sanitation issues, as well as regular olfactory affronts and a macabre mockery of Christian dignity. As a result, innovators soon rushed to address this problem by proposing new graveyard sites, and new internment schemes. One such innovator

Catherine II was Empress of Russia for more than 30 years. Born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst on May 1729 in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland), she became Catherine in 1745, after being received into the Russian Orthodox Church. She married Grand Duke Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the Russian throne. The couple had a son, Paul, and in 1762 he became Tsar Peter III. When he was overthrown Catherine was declared empress. Peter was offed in suspicio

The wonderful people over at Pop Sonnets have spent so much time putting a old spin on modern songs. They're absolutely wonderful.

Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the many creative practices that arose from this synthesis, Tibetan Buddhist music ranks very highly in importance. As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has complex systems of musical notation and a long history of written religious song. “A vital compon

Reducing an artist’s work to their biography produces crude understanding. But in very many cases, life and work cannot be teased apart. This applies not only to Sylvia Plath and her contemporary confessional poets but also to James Joyce and Marcel Proust and writers they admired, like Dante and Cervantes. Such an artist too is Frida Kahlo, a practitioner of narrative self-portraits in a modernising idiom that at the same time draws extensively on tradition. The literary nat