Driss Chraïbi, Une enquête au pays
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
Ovid, The Art of Love
Fouad Laroui, La Femme la plus riche du Yorkshire
Éric Corbeyran, La Conjuration d'opale
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien
China Miéville, Embassytown
Melanie McDonald, Eromenos
Vladimir ( Read more... )

I am sitting in the travellers lounge of Hong Kong International, where the lights are permanently dimmed and everyone staggers around staring into space, seeing magic-eye 3D pictures in the carpet pattern or zoning out meditatively in front of the king-size Toblerones. I love this airport and I love this city - it's just a shame I'm always passing ( Read more... )

Here is that meme of first-lines-of-the-month, in my case a staggeringly boring selection - apologies:

Random memories of the honeymoon, in no order: Stopping at a tiny railroad town in southern Tennessee and going to a proper old soda fountain, where the waitress thought we were French because we said we lived in Paris ( Read more... )

From a linguistic point of view, it's really a fascinating time to be in France right now. The whole language seems to be going through a lot of big changes on a basic level, and things like grammar and pronunciation are relatively big issues ( Read more... )

I am in London again, just for a couple of days. Work suddenly gave me some leave and, on the spur of the moment pretty much, I decided to come over and try and meet up with some friends I haven't seen for ages. Unfortunately this backfired, since most of them, understandably I suppose, found that 48 hours wasn't enough notice to clear up their ( Read more... )

Ten minutes before I need to go to work, and I've just run into the Ducat over the road desperate to get something down about this city, and feeling full of tiny epiphanies the way I always do when I cycle to work. It's cold now, winter's basically arrived and my hands are freezing on the handlebars, but by the time I get up to the river I've ( Read more... )

It's been an uncharacteristically sociable weekend over here. After the monk juice episode of Friday night - thank you all for your comments - oh and by the way, that weird thing on my nose I was telling you about? Woke up Saturday morning and it was gone. Bizarre.

By the time we'd got over our hangovers yesterday it was time to go out again - up ( Read more... )

Yet more strikes here yesterday. Paris was just one big, shouty march lined with riot police holding semi-automatic rifles. I cycled in early and went to the gym before work just to beat the rush.

And do you know what they were protesting about, o Internets? Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age from....wait for it....from 60 to 62.

Can you ( Read more... )

For some reason Hannah and I have this weird thing where we use American pronunciations when we're talking about food. I think it's partly because she watches so much Rachel Ray on cable and partly because culinary terms seem to include a particularly high proprtion of words which are said very differently on different sides of the Atlantic. Hence ( Read more... )

Well, August is winding down, the politicians are back at work, and schools all over France are psyching themselves up for the big rentrée. This is a country where almost everyone seems to go on holiday at the same time, and in the first week of August, when the aoûtiens are leaving and the juilletistes haven't yet come back, you're hard pushed to ( Read more... )