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Category / Nostalgia

Forgotten Romantic Rituals of Halloween’s Past

Halloween is commonly known as the holiday where people dress in costume, go trick or treating, and seek out a good fright. These staples have been the focus of the holiday for quite some time, but what some might not know is Halloween’s more amorous roots and fortune-telling matchmaking rituals. During a time when the…

The Quest for the Irish Atlantis Is a Thing

Every seven years, it emerged from the mist. The isle of “Hy-Brasil,” aka the ancient Irish Atlantis bound to the whims of the sea, revered by locals as the home of their pagan gods, or else, as the outpost of a lone magician and his castle – the rumour mill never stopped churning. Nor did…

Paris’ Dusty Diary : A Peek Inside the City’s Most Secret Library

Guarded by a fortress of medieval walls cut from thick ominous sandstone, Les Archives Nationales means business. The former humble abode to a member of the French aristocracy, today this decadent sprawling chateau houses France’s most precious documents, each securely locked behind layers of mahogany-framed, etched-glass bookshelves. Formerly bequeathed the title “Hôtel de Soubise,” the…

The Last Great Beatnik Café

Behind every generation of revolutionary writers, there’s usually a time-worn café. Hemingway had Paris’s La Closerie Des Lilas; Simone de Beauvoir, the Café de Flore. For San Francisco, the cradle of the Beatnik movement – or at least, its caffeine source – was the Caffe Trieste. High on a hilltop in Little Italy, Caffe Trieste was…

She Was India’s ‘Frida Kahlo’

The bold red lip. The dark, enigmatic brows. Leaning up against the wall with her hair braided tight, the young woman looked every bit like Frida Kahlo, posing for a shot with her photographer-lover. She was also an artist – albeit, comparatively unsung – in her own right. Meet Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s answer to Frida’s…

After Dark at the Shakespeare & Co in Paris

Paris is just one of those places in the world where talented people get together and make magical things. Filmmaker Spike Jonze and one of the few handbag designers in the world I actually think is worth raving about these day, Olympia Le-Tan, got together to collaborate on a short film set in one of…

When Vegetarians were considered so Radical, they only Belonged in Isolated Utopian Communes

No kings. No priests. No aristocracies. Only a society whose residents believed they should “grow together — not by competition, but by united action.” It may sound like a Bob Dylan lyric, but it’s a 104-yr-old excerpt from Herland, the science fiction novel by suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gillman in which a money free, farming heavy,…

The Lost Art of Decorating with Shells

In Margate, on the south-east coast of England, there is an underground grotto lined with majestic mosaics made entirely of seashells – and no-one knows how it got there. The site was discovered in 1835 by a father and son who were attempting to dig a duck pond. The story goes that the young boy…

An African Vatican: The World’s Largest Church is a Colossal 1980s Replica

Like a mirage in the dusty haze that settles over the African bush, stands an almost exact replica of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City. Upon its completion in 1989, not only did the lookalike structure ‘borrow’ the design of the Roman Renaissance dome and encircled plaza, but measuring in at 30,000 square metres, it even took St.…

Sneak a Peek at the Facebook of 400 Years Ago

Social media may be the poster child of the 21st century, but the ideas behind LinkedIn and Facebook go back a long, long way. Dutch PhD scholar Sophie Reinders is currently exploring how personal books from many centuries ago known as alba amicorum – Latin for “friend books” – functioned as a sort of pre-dated version of our modern social…

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