France

I first planned out the story during the Easter holidays, while I was accompanying a school trip to France. Easter for me has many memories and associations, all of them French; elaborate carnivals, egg hunts in my great-grandmother’s garden, the exquisite displays in the windows of the confiseries and chocolateries. And the church, always the church: straddling feasting and fasting, paganism and piety with its usual panache. It was inevitable, then, that the book would focus partly on that conflict between indulgence and guilt, motherhood and patriarchy, with chocolate as the central metaphor. … [Read more...] about ‘I was told there was no market for foody books set in rural France’: Joanne Harris on writing Chocolat

'We need to make sure that equipment that is destined for Canada gets to and stays in Canada, and I've asked ministers to follow up on these particular reports,' he told a press conference. … [Read more...] about Germany accuses the US of ‘modern day piracy’ for seizing a shipment of medical equipment – as French officials claim they were forced to fight with American buyers for millions of masks on a Chinese tarmac

“What I am doing here is eventually to make my iPad drawings into something like the Bayeux tapestry, ie you will walk past it. The Bayeux tapestry is 90 metres long. It contains no shadows, no reflections and certainly no perspective as that would stop time. It would look very odd. Bayeux is 40 minutes’ drive from here. In European art history it is ignored. Why? It is like a Chinese scroll: very sophisticated. In a book I read recently called 1066, the author dismissed it as cartoonish. I concluded he wasn’t very visual.” … [Read more...] about David Hockney urges us to escape lockdown through a pencil

Originally affecting the Pont des Arts and Pont de l'Archevêché, the padlocks can now be found on almost all of the bridges across the Seine, as well as many of the smaller footbridges that span the canals in the 10th arrondissement. On the most popular bridges the guard rails now consist of a solid wall of metal. In a testament to the popularity of the act, even Google Maps now denotes the Pont de l'Archevêché as "Lovelock bridge". … [Read more...] about Campaign calls for Paris ‘love locks’ to be banned

Coronavirus: Timeline of the global spread of COVID-19 More than a million On April 2nd the Johns Hopkins University announced on Thursday that there were more than a million confirmed coronavirus cases around the world. The US is the most affected with three times the number than China, where the virus emerged in December. Over 50.000 people have died — and the outlook remains grim. … [Read more...] about US accused of seizing face mask shipments bound for Europe, Canada