Fleet of word and deed
We know perhaps too much about Paul Morand, and certainly too little. Distillations of his being, his writer’s essence and his place in history most often focus on his celebrated friendships with Chanel and Proust, his occasionally bombastic, somewhat affected and at times self-glorifying public persona, his casual intolerance of much that did not conform...
High life and dirty boulevards
The films in this list may range widely in style and subject, from brooding dramas to spectacular action movies, from French New Wave masterpieces to slightly dated 80s thrillers; some are French productions while others are American movies filmed in Paris, but one thing is true of all of them: they couldn’t have been set...
Pablo
An award-winning graphic biography of one of the world’s best-loved artists, Pablo follows Picasso’s artistic career from his origins in penury to the advent of modern art. In early 20th-century Paris, 19-year-old Pablo Picasso finds himself living amongst the bohemians of Montmartre. Impoverished and in a turbulent relationship with his muse, ‘La Belle Fernande’, his...
A bookshop like no other
Ah, Paris. The city of love and food and books. Abundant with literary cafés and penniless poets. Home of Le Procope, the city’s oldest restaurant still trading, founded in 1686, where Voltaire is supposed to have drunk forty cups of coffee a day. Also home to Bar Hemingway, at the Ritz Paris Hotel. So called...
Rosa Rankin-Gee: Echoes from the island
Rosa Rankin-Gee’s wonderfully accomplished debut novel The Last Kings of Sark explores a friendship triangle developed over an intense summer on Sark island with repercussions that last for years. Emma Young catches up with her. The Last Kings of Sark won Shakespeare & Company’s inaugural Paris Literary Prize in 2011. Extremely-belated congratulations – I suspect...
Coconuts and random acts
Albert Alla’s debut novel Black Chalk is an unsettling exploration of passion and modern morality in which the sole witness and survivor of a school shooting in the Oxfordshire countryside returns to the scene of the devastation after eight meandering years searching for meaning and reconciliation in big cities and on small islands. He was...
