The recent announcement that the Musée d’Orsay is to return a Klimt to the heirs of its Jewish owner shows how much the plunder of art by the Nazis is a live issue even today…
REVIEW The French Royal Wardrobe
No, not a book about a large cupboard: the Hôtel de la Marine, on place de la Concorde in Paris is a storage facility on an altogether different scale…
Picturing a revolution
It lasted just 72 days, but as a case study in the sheer untamable messiness of history, it’s hard to do better than the Paris Commune of 1871.
A question of character

Here’s one for the pub quiz. What do the Paris transport authority, France’s national railway company and heavyweight daily newspaper Le Monde have in common?
Ader’s winged wonder refreshed

Clément Ader’s gloriously fantastical Avion III, his hallucinatory mash-up of steam engines, variable geometry bat wings and propellor blades like giant feathers…