Dr Tony Shaw

A writer of short stories, poems and novels (notably L'Année du Mistouflon ), Ann-Marie Chapouton (1934–2000) created a library in Lo...

The watercolourist Didier Brousse's galerie. Outside is a printed comment by Monique Pujo Monfran, stating that Didier Brousse has w...

A view of Lourmarin from near the cemetery where Albert Camus is buried. The Rue Albert Camus is in the centre of  the village. ...

Appropriately, the cemetery in which the writer Henri Bosco is buried is just off Avenue Henri Bosco. And interestingly, this road sign (...

I hadn't heard of the poet  Christian Gabriel/le Guez Ricord, , and would still be ignorant of his existence if it hadn't been fo...

A view of the full east elevation of Le Facteur Cheval's superb work of art, essentially made over a period of thirty-three years by...

As non-purpose-built pubs go, the Samuel Peto in Rendezvous Street, Folkestone, Kent, must surely rate as one of the most impressive in th...

The title of Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer (lit. 'No Crying') is taken from an expression in one of Marina Tsvetaeva's let...

This novel, translated as My Mother's castle , is a continuation of Pagnol's autobiographical work, being the second volume of t...

In a deeply unpopular decision on 20 March 2003, Tony Blair declared that Great Britain was at war with Iraq. The majority of the public...

Marcel Pagnol's  La Gloire de mon père (trans. as The Glory of My Father ) is the first part of his autobiographical Souvenirs d...

The Tim Bobbin pub, Flixton Road, Urmston, Trafford, Greater Manchester, named after the writer and caricaturist John Collier (1708–86). ...

The characters aren’t named in this book (trans. as The Patience Stone ), and could in fact be many other people in Muslim societies suc...

Québécois writer Jacques Godbout's third novel is Salut Galarneau !  (1967), which anchors the writing more firmly to Québec provinc...

Tar tarin de Tarascon is one of Alphonse Daudet's delightful mock-heroic novels – which even delighted Flaubert – about a small, fat...

Jean-Christophe Rufin's Rouge Brésil  won the Prix Goncourt in 2001, and concerns a rather obscure time in France's history: when...

'PHILIP LARKIN 1922  – 1985 WRITER ' This is one I missed last time I was up there: too busy hunting toads, I suppose. ...

Sunk Island was land on the Holderness peninsula reclaimed from the sea and added to the mainland in 1826. Holy Trinity church (1877) ...

27 Waxholme Road, at the northern end of Withernsea, and where the writer Winifred Holtby stayed from the middle of April to the end of J...

71 Cliff Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire, where Holtby stayed between February and April 1935, and which probably contributed to the ficti...

Winifred Holtby was born in the East Yorkshire village of Rudston, where in the church graveyard there stands a prominent prehistoric mon...

Solibo Magnifique is Patrick Chamoiseau's third novel, and was published four years before his Goncourt success Texaco (1992). I ca...

Denis Humbert's father worked for UNESCO and his family consequently spent many years overseas, and although the writer now lives in ...

Charles Dickens on acid, with strong hints of Rabelais. That's my impression of the huge (only 421 pages, but it seems much bigger) n...