Sophie Farmer

1873: The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern Worldby Liaquat Ahamed (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25)Inflation of the right type, John Maynard Keynes flamboyantly ventured, was needed for Shakespeare’s genius to flourish. In his new book, Liaquat Ahamed opens our eyes to all sorts of things that flourish when prices are instead falling. They include: antisemitism, international skirmishes over debt defaults, and obscure but explosive arguments about the ideal monetary base. Ahamed’s c...

Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Tradesby James Fox (Bodley Head, £25)James Fox set out to find the last practitioners of skills that a century ago would have been familiar across Britain. The result, Craftland, turns out to be a sometimes melancholy and elegiac investigation into regional customs and traditions, richly distinctive local vocabularies and ecosystems, and the kind of craftsmanship it takes a patient lifetime to master. It is the story of the collatera...

“Your daughter is in safe hands,” said an unknown man to İkbal Uzuner’s mother over the phone on the afternoon of October 4. Later that day, İkbal’s mother called back, and the unknown man told her and İkbal’s father, Hasan, to meet at the historic Edirnekapı city walls, near their home in Istanbul, to collect İkbal’s phone. But when Hasan and İkbal’s mother arrived, it wasn’t to retrieve the phone. Instead, they were met with the sight of 19-year-old Semih Çelik — a man who had a history of har...

In and around France’s capital exists a deep-set issue that is not widely discussed and, for some, not known at all. According to the Federation of General Student Associations, one in five students in France does not have enough money to eat. This figure was reported in 2024 among 7,500 students surveyed in France and continues to be as pervasive as it is alarming. What’s more, two-fifths of the surveyed students said that they work to support themselves during their studies, with 35% working m...

When I heard that Matthieu Kassovitz’s award-winning film La Haine (1995) had been made into a musical, I instantly thought: about time. Thirty years later, on October 10th, 2024, La Haine took to La Seine Musicale as a hip-hop musical or what some might call an “urban opera.” With theater director Serge Denoncourt, Kassovitz has staged the “black-blanc–beur“ (“black-white-Arab”) story of Hubert, Vinz and Saïd across 24 hours and through 14 tableaux projections. Making the most of an innovative...

When I lived in Paris, I could spend days wandering the streets with no set direction in mind, letting time go by and wearing my shoes thin. Discovering new pockets of the metropolis, I enjoyed having long conversations with friends and taking new routes to see where we would end up. It seemed that we took on the role of a flâneur/ flâneuse before we knew the meaning of the word! What we did know was that we wanted to uncover Paris, and what better way to do so than on foot?

In the backstreets of Montmartre, I became well acquainted with the graffiti artwork of Miss.Tic. At first, I thought these bold, spray-painted women were the work of different artists, scattered across the city, but the more often I saw the signature style of their skimpy dresses and punchy catchlines, the tiny etched “Miss.Tic” tag at the bottom, I knew there must have been a mastermind behind this street art.

Alain Delon. Those “four syllables known worldwide,” an international sex symbol and master of French cinema, recently left the world’s stage. But back in 1957, when the young actor turned down a seven-year acting contract in America to pursue his career in France, what role did this play in shaping the actor’s long-standing relationship with Paris, and why, in many cases, was this more complicated than meets the eye?  In 1935, an autumn baby was born to parents Édith (née Arnold) and Fabien Del...

The BBC’s New Year’s gift to the nation, without a doubt, was the 8-part crime series — The Serpent. Set in the mid-1970s, we follow two narratives linked by a French, conman-serial killer by the name of Charles “Alain” Sobhraj. Posing as gem dealer “Alain,” Sobhraj traverses the Hippie Trail of South-East Asia with his amour Marie-Andrée “Monique” Leclerc, and sidekick Ajay as they drug and murder young, free-spirited couples to secure money and passports. Whilst the case of two missing Dutch c...

How to best summarise the undertakings, handling and thus scrutiny of Her Majesty’s Government in recent months? Biting down on my tongue to avoid regurgitating The Thick of It’s “omnishambles” labelling, I’ll instead settle for “indefinite”. Headed by an oxymoron personified (pun intended) as the buffoonish-Oxford graduate, Boris Johnson is producing U-turn after U-turn. Knee-deep in a global pandemic and suffering the worst national recession in British history — as well as...