Madder and Woad: Color and the Victorians
“Down with the pretty ladies of the old school! Down with the old masters! Away with the pretty ladies!”
Ken Russell’s Dante’s Inferno (1967), a...
The Quickest and Wickedest Cocktailing in the Fin de Siècle
Picture the heavenly death of lab rats subjected to absinthe tests, like those reported in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1894: “The...
Firefly Diamonds
Illuminated copper engraving, 1705, by Maria Sibylla Merian. Wikimedia Commons.
The traveling bug lover, in the earliest days of insect study, brought back from foreign...