Pierre d’Alancaisez on Art COURTESY OF CHENG-LAN ART ...

SOME DAYS IT SEEMS WE LIVE IN A HORRID WORLD where most humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 65-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for an

The life of an asylum seeker in Paris, in close-up

Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political de

Cezanne 25 at Aix-en-Provence

ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,