Paris
French letters – Albert Camus’s great epistolary love affair
To read the 15-year correspondence between Camus and the actress Maria Casarès is to experience a vertiginous roller-coaster between transcendent joy and abject suffering
Is the Pont-Neuf bridge the new Plato’s cave?
An artist, J.R., working with something called Snap Inc., has covered the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris with a gigantic tarpaulin…
Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?
The ‘readymade’ sculpture, signed R. Mutt, may have been the brainchild of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and only claimed by Duchamp after her death
France is throwing a tantrum at Trump
France is intensifying its counter-offensive against what it calls misinformation. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors confirmed they have opened a…
Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning
Born in Illinois in 1910 in the middle of a hurricane, the experimental Surrealist became the model of the fiercely independent artist
James Baldwin – dogged by painful uncertainties throughout life
Often snared in emotional turmoil, he never knew who his father was, and resisted being pigeonholed on questions of race, blame and responsibility
Adventures in the City of Light: Rousseau’s Lost Children, by Gavin McCrea, reviewed
An academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau slips back in time to 1777 to accompany his hero on long philosophical rambles around Paris
The turbulent life of the Marquis de Morès – the 19th-century aristocrat turned populist thug
Soldier, duelist and frontier ranchman, the anti-Semitic adventurer brought cowboy-style politics to the streets of Paris as the Third Republic lurched from one crisis to another
Paul Poiret and the fickleness of fashion
The master couturier, once celebrated by le tout Paris, found himself by the 1920s debt-ridden and eclipsed by the likes of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli
There’s something about Marianne – but can French identity be defined?
The Parisian public belongs to ‘all classes and creeds’, yet the sounds, smells and street furniture remain unmistakably French, says Andrew Hussey
Roman Polanski ruined my hair
The Prom was Berlioz and Strauss, but the Albert Hall is always the star for me. It is a lover’s…
Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name
The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed…
The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann
Ignoring her mother Liv Ullmann’s advice, 16-year-old Linn accepted the offer of a photo shoot in Paris in 1983 – and has been haunted by the experience ever since
Who’s the muse? In a Deep Blue Hour, by Peter Stamm, reviewed
A documentary film-maker grows obsessed by a recurring character in a celebrated series of novels – much to their author’s mounting displeasure
Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed
An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer
A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed
Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother
Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre
Emmanuel Carrère knows when to let the horrors speak for themselves in his moving, hard-hitting account of the trial of the perpetrators
The stark, frugal world of Piet Mondrian
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
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
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
‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879.…
Paris, city of blight
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
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
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
