Paris

The stark, frugal world of Piet Mondrian

26 October 2024 9:00 am

In September 1940 the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, a refugee from war and the London…

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer

Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Kafka, spitting blood, escapes Prague to join his sister in Bohemia, and a fictional lover flees the wrath of an outraged husband in Josipovici’s delightful two-in-one trick

How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination

15 June 2024 9:00 am

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879.…

Paris, city of blight

4 May 2024 9:00 am

You know that feeling when you haven’t seen someone for several years and when you do, you really notice the…

A free spirit: Clairmont, by Lesley McDowell, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Even by the Villa Diodati’s standards, Claire Clairmont was unconventional, seducing Byron when she was 18, and giving birth to their child after a possible affair with Shelley

The crimes of Le Corbusier

14 October 2023 9:00 am

We can all sympathise with his desire to end bad, ugly new building, but too many of his own projects have had to be scrapped for functional reasons

Rooms with little left to view: the queer spaces of E.M. Forster and others

2 September 2023 9:00 am

Diarmuid Hester goes in search of the private places of eight remarkable figures from the 20th century, to find only Derek Jarman’s cottage preserved intact as a shrine

The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic

12 August 2023 9:00 am

With its carefully calibrated sense of time, the Iliad is clearly the work of a single man and not a ‘rolling snowball’ of different contributions, argues Robin Lane Fox

The Franco-Prussian war changed the map of Europe – so why are we so ignorant about it?

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Rachel Chrastil describes how Bismarck, relying on Gallic pride to provoke the war he wanted, ensured that France would fight without a single ally

Love in the shadow of the Nazi threat

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Florian Illies describes the charged atmosphere of Europe in the early 1930s, as people grew increasingly desperate to celebrate their last chance of freedom

The rise and fall of bohemia

2 April 2023 5:00 pm

In the Kunsthalle Praha, a smart new gallery in Prague, a Scottish professor from UCLA called Russell Ferguson is trying…

The murder of Lola and the failure of Marconism

19 October 2022 4:00 pm

Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her…

The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…

The unpleasant truth about Joseph Roth

1 October 2022 9:00 am

The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher

I’m a one-woman man

10 September 2022 9:00 am

Gstaad There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the…

The diary of a tortured man: Deceit, by Yuri Felsen, reviewed

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…

Paris's glittering new museums

2 July 2022 9:00 am

The refurbishment of Paris’s galleries and museums continues apace, with money no object, finds Rupert Christiansen

The sad fate of Edna St Vincent Millay – America’s once celebrated poet

21 May 2022 9:00 am

In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen…

Disregarded for decades, Jean Rhys stayed true to her vision of life

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller

Unhurried and accomplished whodunit: ITV's Holding reviewed

19 March 2022 9:00 am

A couple of years ago, I happened to read Graham Norton’s third novel Home Stretch. Rather patronisingly, perhaps, I was…

Anne Hidalgo’s socialist reign of error in Paris

30 August 2021 3:31 am

A photograph, taken in June 2014, has become emblematic of Anne Hidalgo’s Socialist rule of Paris. In the picture stands…

Welcome to the Impasse Ronsin – the artists’ colony to beat them all

3 July 2021 9:00 am

Rosie Millard is transported to the Impasse Ronsin, a tiny, squalid cul de sac in Paris’s 15th arrondissement that was once the centre of the modern-art world

Two hours of kitsch tomfoolery: Amélie at the Criterion reviewed

12 June 2021 9:00 am

The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the…