Graham Robb

The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo

8 June 2024 9:00 am

Mark Bostridge’s obsession with Victor Hugo’s beautiful daughter almost rivals her own infatuation with Albert Pinson, the naval officer she pursued around the world

Adieu to Indochina

29 April 2023 9:00 am

Vuillard’s powerful novel analyses the French army’s humiliation in 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and the motivations of the principal players

The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…

Journey to ‘the grimmest place in the world’

3 April 2021 9:00 am

Suffering from post-traumatic stress and the effects of government austerity measures, Paul Jones resigned as the head of an inner-city…

Has Notre-Dame ever been a symbol of unity for the French?

4 April 2020 9:00 am

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier…

Even in supposedly liberal circles, homophobia and racism are still quite acceptable in France

9 June 2018 9:00 am

After an absence of 30 years, Didier Eribon, professor of sociology at the University of Amiens, returned to the seedy…

Eilean Donan Castle on Skye, with peat bog and marsh in the foreground

For peat’s sake: Britain’s bogs and moorland in crisis

7 April 2018 9:00 am

In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’.…

Even when Proust was sedated with heroin, there was no escaping the blaring of klaxons, the thud of demolition and the renovation of his neighbour’s toilet

The martyrdom of Proust

28 October 2017 9:00 am

Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by…

France’s favourite bedtime story: a sanitised version of the French Revolution

18 July 2015 9:00 am

The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…

Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm