Paris
The dark comedy of the Senate torture report
Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports,…
Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
Let’s all become Japanese for a while
This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to…
An American in Paris: a zingy new Wheeldon dance-musical that you won’t want to miss
A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places,…
Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?
The popular sport has spread to France. Are things really that bad, wonders Jonathan Meades
Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…
To call this offering a book is an abuse of language
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world…
Andrew Roberts’s diary: Just who’s the despot here – Napoleon or Paxman?
To the British embassy in Paris for a colloquium on ‘Napoleon and Wellington in War and Peace’ organised by our…
Opera North’s Coronation of Poppea: a premium-rate sex-line of an opera
Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine…
My first Arc de Triomph was a triumph
Aboard our coach from Rouen to Paris for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe our lady guide put it succinctly:…
Anthony Horowitz’s diary: Keeping James Bond’s secrets for the Smersh of publishing
It was quite fun being named as the new writer of 007 — although actually I’d make a lousy spy.…
Picasso’s dealer
When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little…
The man who brought Cubism to New York
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he…
The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous,…
The breasts that launched Les Fleurs du Mal
This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with…
Robert Harris’s diary: My accidental war with Tony Blair
To Paris, for the launch of the French edition of my novel about the Dreyfus affair. As we land, I…
The Paris of Napoleon III was one big brothel – which is why the future Edward VII loved it
Stephen Clarke lives in Paris and writes book with titles such as 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Dirty Bertie…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
From Göring to Hemingway, via Coco Chanel – the dark glamour of the Paris Ritz at war
In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by…
Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects…
First novels: When romance develops from an old photograph
The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and…
What Emperor Augustus left us
Roderick Conway Morris on the influence and legacy of Augustus
Blonde, beautiful — and desperate to survive in Nazi France
Around 200 Englishwomen lived through the German Occupation of Paris. Nicholas Shakespeare’s aunt Priscilla was one. Men in the street…
Braque in full flight
Towards the end of his life, Georges Braque described his vision in the following terms: ‘No object can be tied…
