About Michael Kamil's book “Marginalia of Medieval Art” Funny pictures from the margins of handwritten medieval books are so well known to all users of what is left of the Internet that many of us have long since become boring. At the same time, not everyone can explain why they often look defiant even in modern times. This and related interesting questions are the subject of Michael Kamil’s study “Marginalia of Medieval Art” - at the request of “Gorky” Olga Soboleva talks about it.

From Perry Anderson's book Spectrum. From right to left in the world of ideas" In 2005, historian and sociologist Perry Anderson collected in one book a gallery of portraits of thinkers of the 20th century, aiming to present a wide panorama of ideas, from conservative to progressive. We are publishing a fragment dedicated to the autobiography of historian Eric Hobsbawm and his difficult relationship with the communist movement.

About the two-volume book “Visual representations of Russianness in the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries” It may seem that the history of costume is not the most exciting topic unless you are specifically interested in it. Maria Leskinen's book proves the opposite: the story of how the Russian national costume was invented in the 19th and 20th centuries inevitably turns into a discussion about the invention of the Russian nation.