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excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

Sometime in April the old and refined Victorianist Robert Langbaum came to Virginia in order to hold a conference at our university. Going out for a meal, I mentioned that I was going to spend a week in Hong Kong at the beginning of May for professional purposes. He answered

excerptsAlthough if you observe it partially and with amusement the Chinese landscape may look like any other landscape, the fundamental impression is of being on another planet. The soil suggests here that the matter froze quickly while boiling and it stood still in dramatic

As I said in the above-written, the Chinese religion has three important parts, of which the most important, the philosophical one, is at the same time the oldest of all and the most respected and praised among the people. It has many followers and, instead of God, they

You do not need a passport to travel to Egypt or to any other English colony. A visit card will do. In Alexandria, I made friends with the tropical flora: date trees that bear almost 100 kg of fruit each year, bananas or the cursed fruits because they grow without any effort

excerptIn 1898, at the general assembly of the Romanian Geographic Society, its general secretary, George I. Lahovary, presenting a report on the activities performed the previous year, remarked that the Romanians had lately undertaken travels and even explorations of some

*I intended to be concerned with literary form in this series of reportage. I can see I have done better than I expected. At the moment, my problem is preserving the chronological order of events. Our departure from Odessa was marked by a small, insignificant in fact, incident,

excerpt A few essential socio-economic mutations have occurred in Romania in the last decade. Gaining individual freedom, in addition to the possibility of free economic initiative, briefly, the first steps towards a market economy, had as an immediate consequence the need

It is so hard to put on paper relative memories about someone who used to be very close; you know the person so well that even his or her most characteristic features, be it even genius, appear as natural, and you take them for granted, without further research.  However,

I did not meet the great, indefatigable entomologist Aristide Caradja (1861-1955), but everything I have found out about him from firsthand sources has helped me understand he was a unique personality, an absolutely fascinating man. It is undoubtedly an indirect kind of

Employment of the words collection and collector seems to have a settled semantic buttressing and clarity in all its meanings. I do not think that there is such a collector who would look for an established definition of these terms in encyclopaedias. A collector is confident

Shortly after World War I a new name amidst art collectors in the know started to compel recognition: that of poet Ion Minulescu. At that time, more intensely than in previous years, he would, due among others to his obligations as Director General of the Arts, visit exhibitions,