Jeremy Harding

In​ the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a smitten...

I spent​ the morning of 24 June listening to the referendum results on the BBC, slept briefly, opened the laptop and began looking into the possibility of Irish citizenship in a strangely upbeat frame of mind. I discovered later that my British relatives in France – in-laws, partner, children – were downloading documents about becoming French. The Irish option is less...

In January​ 1939, an itinerant Angolan sent a postcard from the Belgian Congo to a friend back home. ‘Salute my wife,’ he wrote. ‘Tell her that her old husband still has not lost the fire of his youth. He faces thundering rain and hunger, but he goes by canoe, carrying loads as if he were a boy of 18.’ Antoine Freitas was approaching 40 when he wrote the card; the...

French intellectual tradition is often happier than its rival Anglo-Saxon versions to put the world – and the fact – in parenthesis for as long as the conversation is worth having. We know, too, that it’s happy to reason on the basis of statistics but loath to slam ‘facts’ on the table like marked aces. It’s also noticeable that nature writing hasn’t caught on there as it has in the UK: in France writing is still first and foremost a performance of culture. A writer venturing into the wild with a smartphone and a notepad has got to be joking; only scientists and civil servants should be doing this.