200-year-old condom decorated with erotic art goes on display in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum
The Netherlands' national museum has a new object on display that merges art with Amsterdam 's infamous Red Light District: a nearly 200-year-old condom, emblazoned with erotic art.
The Rijksmuseum said in a statement that the playful prophylactic, believed to be made around 1830 from a sheep's appendix, 'depicts both the playful and the serious side of sexual health.'
It is part of an exhibition called 'Safe Sex?' about 19th century sex work that opened on Tuesday.
The condom, possibly a souvenir from a brothel, is decorated with an erotic image of a nun and three clergymen.
The phrase 'This is my choice' is written along the sheath in French. According to the museum, this is a reference to the Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting 'The Judgment of Paris,' which depicts the Trojan prince Paris judging a beauty contest between three goddesses.
The condom is on display until the end of November.
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The Guardian
20 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Frederick Forsyth obituary
Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and 'bashed out' The Day of the Jackal, he 'never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist'. Forsyth, who has died aged 86, also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain's armed forces, but it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered. Forsyth's manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher's sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle – an event that everyone knew did not happen. The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal – an anonymous English assassin – almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader's sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim. It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers' of America Edgar award for best first novel, attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits – he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was 'pathetic at money'. The 1972 paperback edition of The Day of the Jackal was reprinted 33 times in 18 years and is still in print, but while readers were happy to be taken in by Forsyth's painstakingly researched details (about everything from faked passports to assembling a sniper's rifle), the critics and the crime-writing establishment were far from impressed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Spy and Suspense Stories, published in 1982, by which time Forsyth's sales were well into the millions, declared rather loftily that 'authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers', and the critic Julian Symons dismissed Forsyth as having 'no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise'. It was a formula that readers clearly approved of, with the subsequent novels in that original three-book deal, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974), being both bestsellers and successful films. Novellas, collections of short stories and more novels were to follow. These included The Fourth Protocol (1984), which had a cameo role for the British spy-in-exile Kim Philby and was also successfully filmed, with a screenplay by Forsyth and starring Michael Caine and a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and, against type, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), a sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Nothing, however, was to match the impact of The Day of the Jackal and when a Guardian journalist spotted a copy in a London flat used by the world's most wanted terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or 'Carlos', in 1975, the British press dubbed him Carlos the Jackal, with no need to explain the reference. Born in Ashford, Kent, Frederick was the son of Phyllis and Frederick Sr, shopkeepers at 4 North Street – his mother's dress business operated on the ground floor and his father sold furs on the first floor. He was educated at Tonbridge school, where supportive teachers and summer holidays abroad ensured that Frederick excelled at French, German and Russian. At the age of 16, he enrolled on an RAF flying scholarship course that brought him a pilot's licence by the age of 17 and eased his way into the RAF proper for his national service, where he obtained his pilot's 'wings' and flew Vampire jets as the youngest pilot in the service. However, when he failed in his ambition to be posted to a frontline squadron, he opted for a change of career and in 1958 entered journalism as a trainee with the Eastern Daily Press in their King's Lynn office. In the autumn of 1961 he set his sights on Fleet Street, and his fluency with languages (which now included Spanish) got him a job with Reuters press agency. In May 1962, he was posted to Reuters' office in Paris, where De Gaulle was the target of numerous assassination attempts by disaffected Algerians. The experience was not lost on Forsyth, but before he could put it to good use in The Day of the Jackal, there were other journalistic postings, a war to survive and a non-fiction book to write. The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. By 1990, Forsyth had undergone an amicable divorce from Carrie, but a far less amicable separation from his investment broker and his life savings, and claimed to have lost more than £2m in a share fraud. To recoup his losses, Forsyth threw himself into writing fiction, producing another string of bestsellers, although none had the impact of his first three novels. He was appointed CBE in 1997 and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2012. In 2016 he announced that he would write no more thrillers and that his memoir The Outsider (2015), which revealed that he had worked as an unpaid courier for MI6, or 'The Firm' as he called it, would be his swansong. He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
The Sun
38 minutes ago
- The Sun
I'm married but fell pregnant with my handsome ex's baby after passionate nights of sex
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I fancied him all over again. He invited me back to his new apartment overlooking the river and he told me he'd never stopped thinking about me. I've never felt as desirable as when he kissed me passionately that night. We had sex and it was like old times. We met a few times after that and always ended the evening with sex at his place. We used protection so I was horrified last week to discover that I'm pregnant. I don't know how it happened but the condom must have failed. It's definitely his. I'm in a mess. DEIDRE SAYS: This guy was history but your husband and daughter are the family that you love. You're on the edge of jeopardising life as you know it. If you go through with the pregnancy, your ex will be responsible for looking after this child financially and preferably emotionally too. How do you think he'd react to the news? You could choose to forget the dates and try to pass this off as your husband's baby but secrets have a habit of getting out. 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The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Rebekah Vardy selling huge Portugal villa for £9.7million after nearly paying off Wagatha Christie legal costs
REBEKAH and Jamie Vardy have put their luxury Portuguese villa on the market for a huge seven figure sum. The couple are hoping to fetch £9.7 million for the massive and incredibly luxurious pad - which boasts three pools, a gym and six bedrooms. 5 5 5 It comes a few weeks after Becky's bitter six-year libel court battle with Wayne Rooney 's other half Coleen finally ended. A friend of the couple told The Sun: 'They are selling the Portuguese pad - and are looking at different holiday places now. 'They had some great times there but just decided it was time for a change. 'It's actually laughable for anyone to think it has anything to do with the court case . Nothing could be further from the truth. And that's shown by the fact they are looking for a new holiday pad.' The property is located on the millionaires' haunt of Quinta do Lago where stars including Alan Shearer, Holly Willoughby, Phillip Schofield, John Terry and Duncan Bannatyne all have holiday homes. Agents Knight Frank wrote of the pad: 'This magnificent property, built over four levels, showcases meticulous attention to lifestyle details.' 'In addition to the three external pools, which epitomize a contemporary lifestyle, the villa includes a central electro-chromic glass lift accessing each floor.' There is also a cinema room for the owner to enjoy. Last month The Sun told how Rebekah had £370,000 left to pay off from her eye-watering Wagatha Christie legal costs. The rival wags faced off one last time over Coleen's "assessment costs" as a judge ruled Becky should pay £212k on top of the £1.19million settlement, totalling at least £1.4million. A source told The Sun at the time: "Becky's breathing a sigh of relief today as she happily closes the chapter on this ongoing saga. "There are big plans coming up for her and so now she's 100 per cent focused on the future." It's claimed Becky paid off approximately two-thirds of the bill four years ago. 5
