This past winter was among the most brutal I’ve known. With its record-low temperatures and record-high snowfall, my only avenue of escape into spring was through the bottled flowers in my cabinet—and through my little blue notebook of scent.
Perfume...
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 trips magical tales of sailors becoming drunk and dizzy from sucking on honeycombs built by...
“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 BBC biopic of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, features rebels building a bonfire of classical paintings, prancing...
Feature Image: The Three Witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Daniel Gardner, 1775. Wikimedia Commons.
“…aperitive, abstersive, carminative, digestive, discussive, diuretic, incisive, vulnerary, cephalick, neurotick, stomachick, splenetick, nephritick, hysterick, sudorifick, analeptick, and alexipharmick.” —The powers of pennyroyal, per William Salmon, M.D....
A Cup of Chocolate (1844), by Charles Beranger
© Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images
At nine o’clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully,...