Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, aged only 22 years old. Then a budding journalist and short-story writer, and recently married to older wife Hadley, Hemingway moved into a small flat at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, just north of the tiny Place de la Contrescarpe in the 5th Arrondissement’s Latin Quarter. While the […]
It’s certainly a wacky idea: each summer the ‘Paris Plage’ project brings the beach to the city by laying some 2000 tonnes of sand straight on top of Paris’ busy riverside motorway. Eccentric, for sure - and yet it works, and it works a dream. Since it’s launch in 2002, Paris Plage has become one […]
George Orwell moved to Paris in the spring of 1928, taking up a room in a small hostel in the Latin Quarter, at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer. Aged 24, The young Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) had moved across the channel to concentrate fully on his fledgling writing career: rents in Paris were […]
Bastille Day is a big deal in Paris - each year on the 14th July the city grinds to a halt to celebrate France’s National Holiday. Known in France as the ‘Fete de la Bastille’, or more colloquially as ‘quatorze juillet‘ (the fourteenth of July), the event comemorates the destruction of King Louis XVI’s grand […]
‘Nuit Blanche‘ is an all-night urban arts festival that takes place in Paris every year on the first Saturday of October.
There’s no true English translation for Nuit Blanche: literally ‘White Night’, it’s the French phrase for staying up until the early hours - and the official Nuit Blanche festival sees the streets of Paris throng […]
