Christian Niessen

I love art, nature, history, policy, languages, dance, skate & books. I'm brave & a dreamer. 😎👉🏻

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@stats_feed The movies and the music for sure!

[New York Post @nypost]

World's oldest living land animal, a 194-year-old tortoise, honored with icon award https://t.co/57RBU2szG8

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@trad_west_ He should play Einsenhower (in a hypothetical movie). He is a great man anyway!

[Daily Roman Updates @UpdatingOnRome]

This is how I’m stepping out today.

Rate my fit.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@UpdatingOnRome @CuriosityonX "ROMA NOVA", The New Rome.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@BParasuk47925 @TerribleMaps Stalin is from Georgia.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@goodreads

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@stats_feed Huns

[After Life 🐕‍🦺 @ForAntilly]

Some wonderfully simple writing advice from Ricky Gervais.

“Write something you care about.”

[Emmett Voss @Emmett_Voss]

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872.

He remembered his grandfather (who had met Napoleon, introduced the Reform Bill of 1832, and served as Prime Minister) "quite well."

In a remarkable interview, he reflected on the world of his youth:

"The world where I was young was a solid world. A world where all kinds of things that have now disappeared were thought to be going to last forever."

The British took naval supremacy not as a political reality but as a fact of nature. Germany wasn't feared — Bismarck was dismissed as "a rascal" and "a sort of uneducated farmer." The assumption was that Goethe and Schiller would eventually bring Germany back to civilisation.

Bismarck himself compared Germany and England to an elephant and a whale — each formidable in its own element, no danger to each other.

That was exactly how they felt.

There was also a shared political assumption: that the entire world was gradually, inevitably moving toward parliamentary democracy. His grandmother once said cheerfully to the Russian ambassador:

"Perhaps someday you will have a parliament in Russia."

He replied: "God forbid."

Russell notes, dryly, that a Russian ambassador today might give the same answer — "except for the first word."

At home, life was shaped by Puritanical austerity. Family prayers at 8am. Half an hour of piano practice beforehand — which Russell hated. Eight servants, yet food of "the utmost simplicity." If apple tart appeared alongside rice pudding, the adults had the apple tart.

Russell had the rice pudding.

What Russell describes isn't just personal memoir. It's a civilisation that had mistaken its own moment for a permanent condition — that looked at the arrangements of the late 19th century and concluded: this is how things are, and how they will remain.

They were wrong about almost everything.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@Arteymas_ Amazing

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@MedievalScholar It's pure poetry.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@Civixplorer The Italian armet and the Corinthian helmet 🫶🏻

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@historydefined Louvre

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@Matt_Pinner It's Norwey. For the quality of life 😎🫶🏻

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

Alexander von Humboldt. The most famous man on Earth after Napoleon in the 1800s, now almost forgotten.
A true gift to humanity: explorer, adventurer, scientist who discovered, mapped and recorded the world in ways that still shape our lives today.
If you’ve got 10 seconds, just ask Grok about him. You’ll be amazed.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@thinkingwest I must read it again. It's too much wonderful this book.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@ImGinnyRobinson This is a disaster. We must live in a democracy. We must be free. Cowards are sending the best of the US population into a useless war. We are Western civilization. We must stand united against tyranny and defend our right to live.

[Stephen King @StephenKing]

Nothing is much better than a cup of hot coffee or tea on a cold night, and an entertaining novel to read.

[Christian Niessen @Christi66483204]

@mcgillmd921 ...and Octavian killed Caesarion, Caesar’s son by Cleopatra, killed at the age of 17. He wanted no rivals left who might one day contest his right to rule as Caesar’s heir.