proustitute:

Bobby Fischer. Photographed by Richard Meek for Sports Illustrated.

“Stefan Zweig suggests both that chess is a cause of madness and that, perhaps more importantly, madness may be why certain people are defenseless against the charms of chess. That far, I follow him. But I think that Zweig mounts an even more radical attack on chess. His antichess novella [Schachnovelle] raises a last question—admittedly, the most worrying one that any chess lover must, but does not want to, face: Perhaps we should not think of a serious, truly life-engrossing devotion to chess as a cause of madness. For perhaps it simply is madness. Perhaps devoting one’s life to that singular obsession—the ‘ridiculous goal of backing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board,’ as Zweig so aptly put it—does not bring on, but rather constitutes, madness.”

— Yascha Mounk, from “Chess and Madness” in The Paris Review (thanks to theredshoes) 

dontpickfrommyappletree:

Philadelphia Story 

Uncle Willy getting his mack on…

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

ovadiaandsons:

”Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners.”

~~Noel Coward

ornamentedbeing:

The Follies circa 1920.

Photograph by Édouard Boubat

earwigbiscuits:

El Salon de la Moda…Victorian fashion print (via)

(Source: phillip-silva)

earwigbiscuits:

Mlle Marthe Chenal in Le Miracle, 1911 (Théatre National de l’Opéra, Paris)

sniperatwork:

Members of the IRA in the 1970s.

Pretty girls - shame they belong to an organisation of murderous thugs and criminals.