Wuthering
Expectations

I was recently on vacation, in Lyon and Burgundy, a food-and-wine vacation, of little literary interest.  Well, try the Memoirs of Phillipp...

For the last four days, for just two hours a day, a big chunk of the center of Lyon has been converted into a kind of artsy urban theme park...

The Lumière film festival is wrapping up as I write.  Lyon is the city where film was invented, more or less, by the Lumière brothers, and ...

The Frankfurt Book Fair originated soon after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.  I recently browsed through a history of early ...

The point of photographing this horror, advertised all over Lyon, is not to note that potheads are everywhere but rather to puzzle over the ...

“The food” is good in France, I am told.  And it is.  After a month in Paris, we have relocated more permanently to Lyon, long known as the ...

In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eye...

Paris is empty in August, I read, a “ghost town.”   It is like having it to myself.  “Everyone” goes on vacation for a month.  I am Googling...

With a deep sigh of relief, the traveler turned back to France.  There he felt safe.  ( Education , Ch. XXXI) The Education of Henry Adams ...

Henry Adams is for some reason reading Poincaré’s La Science et l’Hypothèse , which purported to be relatively readable.  Trusting in its ex...

At some point it occurred to me that I might get an English degree.  I began taking survey classes to see what they were like, and because t...

As yet he knew nothing.  Education had not begun.  ( The Education of Henry Adams , Ch. 4) Those are the last lines of the chapter titled “...

I’m going for a long time, I mean, for ten months or so.  I’m going in a week.  What an adventure!  But it means this other adventure will h...

Jürgen Osterhammel is a German historian at the University of Konstanz, a specialist in Chinese history and globalization.  His 2009 The Tra...

The other Paris in Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (2015) is that of the criminals, flaneurs, ragpickers, prostitutes, anarchists, saloon singe...

For some reason I had the idea that John Galsworthy’s prose was on the heavy side.  I had had the same idea about Arnold Bennett, but The Ol...

John Galsworthy must introduce more characters in fewer pages than – well – it seems like a lot.  The first chapter of The Man of Property i...

For the purposes of these posts, I am going to pretend that there is no such thing as The Forsyte Saga .  No Nobel prize, no BBC series.  Ju...

I’m working backwards.  Volume One of The Golden Bowl is “The Prince,” ending with a thirty-page book club discussion.  Then comes “The Pri...

The heroine of The Golden Bowl enacts the style of the novel in her story, which is a good trick, but Henry James has a second one nearly a...