Veteran French director Olivier Assayas has spun his cult 90s film Irma Vep into a sexy, funny and dizzyingly multilayered TV series…
REVIEW Paris dans l’oeil de ses habitants
As anyone who follows one of its social media accounts will know, Paris ZigZag is a stylish and authoritative guide to the French capital’s culture and history…
REVIEW The Vanished Collection
“I love riddles and mysteries”, writes the heroine of this real-life detective story, and the one she sets out to solve leads deep into a tangle of European and family histories…
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…
REVIEW Timeless Paris
They could just as easily have called it Time Travel Paris. This beautiful book is a portal into the past, via 18 shops and museums…
REVIEW A la Recherche du Paris de Marcel Proust
For almost 30 years, French publisher Parigramme has been putting out books on just one inexhaustible subject: Paris. Nearly all are excellent, and a handful are in English…
REVIEW L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped
Bulgarian-born US artist Christo had the idea to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in fabric as far back as 1962, but permission wasn’t granted until 2019…
REVIEW Samaritaine
Like the recently reopened Paris store whose story it tells, this handsome title from US-based publisher Assouline is awash with Art Deco gorgeousness and chic…
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.
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…