Meeting Monsieur
Drawing on Victor Hugo’s cryptic diary entries and letters from his wife, Catherine Axelrad’s Célina builds a snapshot of a teenage chambermaid in the Hugo household during the author’s exile in Guernsey, who was apparently prey to the great man’s gargantuan sexual appetites. With a mix of mischief, naivety, pragmatism and curiosity, Célina’s account of...
Our Lady in peril
Of the night of the fire I remember a kaleidoscope of images, a collision of emotions, in quick succession. Through my kitchen window seeing bright-yellow plumes of smoke coiling into the sky, then rushing down the stairs onto quai de la Tournelle, standing right opposite Notre-Dame’s south rose window, the red and orange tongues of...
Singular museums
This list comes out of writing Little, a novel about Madame Tussaud, whose waxworks on the Marylebone Road has always seemed to me a museum about one person. Marie Tussaud lived through the French Revolution, and many of the people she cast she actually knew. Her wax figures represent the different stations of her life:...
Worth watching
Woody Allen’s Manhattan begins with a montage of iconic New York City locations. Park Avenue, the 59th Street Bridge, the Staten Island Ferry; captured in sleek-as-silver Panavision black and white, a procession of these marvels dazzles the eye, while in our ear Allen’s voice agonises over the opening lines of a novel he’s writing. “Chapter...
