Paris
High life
Gstaad There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the…
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Vive la gloire
The refurbishment of Paris’s galleries and museums continues apace, with money no object, finds Rupert Christiansen
When she was good…
In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen…
A true bohemian
Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller
An Englishwoman in Paris
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
A photograph, taken in June 2014, has become emblematic of Anne Hidalgo’s Socialist rule of Paris. In the picture stands…
Bohemian rhapsody
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
Kitsch tomfoolery
The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
We’ll always have Paris
Some friends claim to be making marks on the wall to count the days until liberation. Ah, the forgotten delights…
Moi… Lolita
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
Unhealed wounds
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
Tears before bedtime
I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward…
Paris’s banlieues are burning once again
One of the persistent misconceptions of the riots that swept through France in the autumn of 2005 is that they…
Birds of a feather
Philip Hensher describes how Paris became a magnet for literary-minded lesbians in the early 20th century – where they soon caused quite a stir
Was it ever a symbol of unity?
From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier…
Michael Moorcock: I feel I’ve been cheated by the British state
Back to Texas to prepare for guests arriving for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once again we left our Paris home not…
The carnage inside Charlie Hebdo: an eyewitness’s account of the attack
It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed…
The poetry of sewers
‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us…
The serious games of the Oulipians
Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have…
Dau is not just a pretentious fraud – it’s rather disgusting
The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The…
Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years
Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…
Let them buy Teslas! How Macron became the enemy of the French
Emmanuel Macron is supposed to be the cleverest man in France but he has painted himself so completely into a…
The gilets jaunes have become a symbol of resistance worn with pride by the downtrodden
I met a friend for lunch in Paris last Sunday. He and his wife had come up from the countryside…
