Algeria
The spiritual journey of St Augustine
Christians should consider themselves ‘peregrini’, said Augustine, and his life on the periphery of the Roman empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere
Eat your way round Paris
Moving anticlockwise through the coil of arrondissements, Chris Newens samples the range of cuisines on offer and examines their histories
Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed
Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on
Citizens of nowhere: This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud, reviewed
A fictionalised version of Messud’s recent family history traces the many moves of three generations forced into exile from Algeria
The fresh, forceful voice of Frantz Fanon
The Marxist from Martinique became a rallying figure for anti-colonial movements across the world. But might he have revised his violent message had he lived longer?
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
Weeping wounds
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…
Algeria reminds us that the current of colonisation doesn’t always run just one way
As you glide in to land at the airport outside Algiers, the landscape resembles that of Tuscany: a coastal plain…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
The hype jihad
Isis slaughters kidnap victims because it guarantees headlines. It's better at slaughtering innocents than it is at winning wars
