Paris

The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a haze of exhaustion, one daughter’s struggle to be liked by bullying friends and another’s blushingly awkward first crush. Interwoven with these domestic scenes are chapters set 20 years earlier, in which we see the unfurling of Katherine’s haunting romance. The novel is in part a meditation on differing forms of love, comparing this all-consuming passion,

Around 200 Englishwomen lived through the German Occupation of Paris. Nicholas Shakespeare’s aunt Priscilla was one. Men in the street stopped to gaze at this blonde with the careless allure and raw beauty of Grace Kelly. Some fell instantly in love. Her second mother-in-law thought her face showed truth and sincerity, and the reader shares this impression of integrity under duress. She was a reckless driver, yet was also shy, gentle and biddable. She had a beguiling habit of stroking your arm to show affection. She was not vain. Born in 1916, hers was a rackety childhood. Her self-engrossed parents, imprisoned within a failed marriage, then in new partnerships, rejected

It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war, but we can be grateful for it because it’s a joy to read the correspondence it gave rise to. The letters in this book span the years 1939 to 1952 and take in the Blitz, Diana’s short spell as a farmer in Sussex, a trip to the Far East, when Duff was collecting intelligence on the likelihood of a Japanese invasion, the couple’s three years in the Paris embassy, and several more in their house at Chantilly, as well as a great number of journeys around Europe and North Africa.

In Jonathan Conlin’s Tales of Two Cities the little acknowledged but hugely significant histoire croisée of two rival metropoles gets a long overdue airing. For, like it or not, London and Paris would be much duller places if neither had deemed fit to discover the other. Oddly, up until now no historian has ever explored this fecund, though sometimes grudging, exchange of ideas and cultural mores. Perhaps it required an outsider such as Conlin (though resident in London, he originates from New York) to martial the necessary objectivity. Previously the author of The Nation’s Mantelpiece, the first ever history of London’s National Gallery, Conlin brings an archivist’s industry and an

It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book by announcing that he is not. Richard Cobb wrote books about France — where he was known as l’étonnant Cobb and, according to his obituary in the Independent, ‘once greeted the dawn nude, in the company of a dozen similarly unattired men and women, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde’ — and he had a son called Matthew; and Matthew Cobb’s father was called Richard, so the question is understandable. It must also be annoying, though, because

Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court of Louis XVI. Josephine Baker captured that sentiment with her theme song, ‘J’ai deux amours/Mon pays et Paris.’ And more Americans than Rick Blaine in Casablanca have mused from afar, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Just how many Americans had Paris before Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris crowd becomes clear in David McCullough’s delightful panorama of American life in Paris during the 19th century. Allen’s film

After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding’s new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings. Where should the line be drawn, what constitutes collaboration or resistance, were the Pétainistes craven defeatists or

Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie. Their work brought them into contact with a remarkable group of men, who populate the pages of Philipp Blom’s quirky and original book: the economist and journalist Raynal, who never quite shook off his Jesuit origins; the mass of obscurer contributors to the Encyclopédie; the moody