Marine Le Pen’s return is a nightmare for French centrists
Marine Le Pen’s comeback has thrown France’s presidential election into disarray as rivals for the Élysée Palace scramble to revise…
What should Paris do about Hamza?
Armed with his water gun and foul language, a truculent 14-year-old Arab boy called Hamza has become the unexpected sideshow…
Why do the French have a problem with air conditioning?
In the French city of Nantes, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the city’s long-anticipated railway station was a big event. The…
Paris’s Left Bank is dying
In the heart of Paris’s Left Bank, the Café de Cluny has witnessed many tumultuous events in modern French history.…
What will become of Paris’s ugliest building?
Parisians were recently treated to the impromptu spectacle of a shirtless 26-year-old man scaling bare-handed the 59-story Montparnasse office tower.…
The glorious revival of Paris’s English bookshop
Stepping into Smith & Son bookshop across from the Tuileries, my first instinct is to look for signs of change.…
What happened to Provence?
The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and…
The intertwined lives and deaths of Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir
A strange literary coincidence occurred in Paris exactly 40 years ago, on 14 April, 1986. In the small hours of…
