Would you like to know HOW TO EAT EVERYTHING IN PARIS today? Tune in to our revelatory @garlicandpearls.bsky.social chat with Chris Newens, author of terrific food memoir Moveable Feasts! Insights galore! A sample… @profilebooks.bsky.social @robertloyko-greer.bsky.social @suzanneraine.bsky.social

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social my irrepressible co-host @suzanneraine.bsky.social (still a schoolgirl at heart) takes us through the history, glories and controversies of British CONKERS. The Peckham conkers championship is drawing near… Suzanne has provided me with the kit. Do I dare?

It’s not always about Paris and the Nouvelle Vague, you know. What 5 films best capture the spirit of Mansfield, Notts? A conversation I had with Robert Shore a little while ago… podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

Great ep! I used to bring home tubs of huge conkers from family camping hols near Chinon and flog them at school as 'French Superiors'. Might have to check out Peckham next month...

Many thanks from the @garlicandpearls.bsky.social team for these kind (and highly perceptive) comments on Reddit!

Favourite 10 TV comedies, in no particular order: The Larry Sanders Show The Thick of It Yes Minister Seinfeld Toast of London The In-Betweeners Brass Eye Friday Night Dinner Fawlty Towers The Windsors

Roland Barthes just wants ‘a little cosmos’ inhabited only by you and him:

Honoured to appear as a guest on fab art history podcast #ShowsThatGoOn, to tell the extraordinary story of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, where Paris staged herself as the City of Lights - electrifying! Tune in! open.spotify.com/episode/1SKP...

This week on the @garlicandpearls.bsky.social podcast, @suzanneraine.bsky.social challenges me, a baffled French person, to a very British game: CONKERS! Tune in if you dare: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/c...

This week on the @garlicandpearls.bsky.social podcast, @suzanneraine.bsky.social challenges me, a baffled French person, to a very British game: CONKERS! Tune in if you dare: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/c...

Honoured to appear as a guest on fab art history podcast #ShowsThatGoOn, to tell the extraordinary story of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, where Paris staged herself as the City of Lights - electrifying! Tune in! open.spotify.com/episode/1SKP...

Play for today,the cure

Linnet on a spray of Barberry by_Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues 1580s. Could have gotten a job w/ William Morris 3 centuries later!

Tightly-wrapped infant Christ does not want to be presented in the temple! Intense, hard scene from 1465 by Andrea Mantegna, whose day was today.

Last night, the illuminated Art Nouveau glass façade of glorious Villa Frochot, just south of Pigalle.

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social hear me and @suzanneraine.bsky.social - as guests of the Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival at the Durning Library last June - discuss Frenchness, Britishness and our podcast adventure! 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 📻 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social I help @suzanneraine.bsky.social navigate FRENCH ROUNDABOUTS - not all of them magic. Though giant lemons and colossal snails feature! Tune in: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...

Hal Le Roy's debut in the short The High School Hoofer (1931), amply illustrating what his Wikipedia page describes as "conventional tap with eccentric legomania."

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social I am (only figuratively) at the wheel, and I lead my copilot @suzanneraine.bsky.social on a dizzying tour of French roundabouts, which are more eccentric than one might think! Tune in! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/g...

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social I am (only figuratively) at the wheel, and I lead my copilot @suzanneraine.bsky.social on a dizzying tour of French roundabouts, which are more eccentric than one might think! Tune in! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/g...

Well, a great episode. Any mention of ‘The Magic Roundabout’ also gets extra points from me.

On @garlicandpearls.bsky.social this week, I take @suzanneraine.bsky.social on a round and round trip exploring the mystifying world of French roundabouts… Tune in and find out more!

Today's artist without a (known) birthday: Jacques Linard of Paris. Painter of still lifes and histories. Here, plums, peaches, & melon, from 1642.

A fascinating film, and so ahead of its time.

Cheering window display in Berwick Street. #sohosights

He kneels to kiss the hem of her robe in a wonderfully surreal palace complex. As imagined in 1610 by Hendrick van Steenwyck whose day is today.

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social we ask, with the help of our brilliant guest Izzy Law, whether the sport of SHINTY has any French equivalent. Could ‘la soulé be a contender? And if not, why not? And what does it tell us about Britain and France? Tune in! 🏒 Photo credit: Isabelle Law

Amazing triple profile portrait. Who are they? Why all together, staring at something we cannot see? By Lucas d'Heere, whose day is today.

New episode of @garlicandpearls.bsky.social on HIGHLAND SHINTY 🏒 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 , with our special guest from Skye - skipper, photographer and shinty player Izzy Law! Grab your caman and join us for an exploration of this ancient and quite violent expression of local identity! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

If your head must be on a platter, let it be a lace one. Thomas Pope, later 3d Earl of Downe, by William Larkin in 1615. Gorgeous portrait, really.

‘Terrific Francophile entertainment and education’ - that’s the @garlicandpearls.bsky.social podcast! (We are also Anglophile of course.) Many thanks to the terrific Anglophone French news site La Connexion for featuring us! 🌷 @suzanneraine.bsky.social www.connexionfrance.com/magazine/fro...

This week on the nonpareil podcast @garlicandpearls.bsky.social we are being exceedingly polite 🌷 How do the French 🇫🇷 and the British 🇬🇧 apologise, @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I wonder - and what do they mean by it? 17th-century moralists feature, and we ask why the British constantly say sorry.

Tune in to @garlicandpearls.bsky.social tomorrow with me and the effortlessly polite @suzanneraine.bsky.social and find out who knows best: Tatler Magazine or the Académie Française?

Delighted as ever to have appeared as a guest alongside A.N. Wilson this morning on the Times Radio Breakfast Show hosted by Stig Abell and Rosie Wright - we discussed migrant hotels, but also the importance of learning foreign languages and of shared cultural experiences…

'Those captivated by the recent television serialization of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals should prepare to be thoroughly disabused.' Jonathan Keates on a family of fabulists

The perils of venturing away from the Élysée: Macron in the Béarn, hijacked by friendly singing shepherds who put a beret on him. ‘He’s fiddling with his tie,’ @suzanneraine.bsky.social noted drily when shown the excruciating footage on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social The curse of the surprise beret.

You've been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who's coming to save you?

Another Summer Short this week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social in which I and @suzanneraine.bsky.social ponder the histories and meanings of our respective emblematic headgear. Yes - it’s the béret and bobble hat face-off. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/g...

Single & ready to mingle: Dance & be merry in a castle park courtesy of David Vinckboons, 1610. Today is his day.

Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster for The Killers (1946). Photo by Ray Jones.

"You see, girls, I've run off with one of your husbands." Lora Mae (Linda Darnell), Deborah (Jeanne Crain) and Rita (Ann Sothern) face the titular bombshell in A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Who wears it best? @murielzagha.bsky.social

This week in @thetls.bsky.social I wrote about Adèle Hugo, enigmatic and ill-fated daughter of Victor, her complicated diaries, and the fictional treatment of her story in François Truffaut’s 1975 film Histoire d’Adèle H., starring Isabelle Adjani. t.co/5sJ2rPZvso

This week on the nonpareil 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 podcast @garlicandpearls.bsky.social @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I probe the many meanings of the high vis/gilet jaune, including as a fashion statement. Tune in!

This week on @garlicandpearls.bsky.social the first of our Summer Shorts is a fluorescent face-off between the British high-vis and the French gilets jaunes. What role does the vivid garment play in our respective cultures, @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I ponder. Tune in!

The shorts have arrived!

Tune in tomorrow for the first of a short (naturally) series of zappy summery @garlicandpearls.bsky.social podcasts in which @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I compare and contrast similar things that our two nations do very differently…

It’s the Rousseauiste alternative!

Just spotted my review of Stephen Brindle’s wonderful book Lost London Interiors in the June issue of The World of Interiors. Huzzah!

This week's free Kindle @dean_street_press_ltd 🎉✨ The Other Side of the Moon: The Life of David Niven by Sheridan Morley #DavidNiven #FreeTillFriday #Booksky Link here 📎: bit.ly/3IXJYpG