Paris
Queer spaces
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 one and only
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 war that changed the map of Europe
Rachel Chrastil describes how Bismarck, relying on Gallic pride to provoke the war he wanted, ensured that France would fight without a single ally
Last chance saloon
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
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
Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
His own worst enemy
The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher
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…
