Adieu to Indochina
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
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’
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?
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
After an absence of 30 years, Didier Eribon, professor of sociology at the University of Amiens, returned to the seedy…
For peat’s sake: Britain’s bogs and moorland in crisis
In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’.…
The martyrdom of Proust
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
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
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
