This is not to say that he hasn't been busy until now. He smuggled guns and raided Nazi billets in Paris before he was out of his teens. He went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, finding himself almost immediately in the glamorous orbit of...

Austryn Wainhouse, who rendered the major works of the Marquis de Sade into English. As Wordsworth wrote of his own time in Paris, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven." In these pages, Seaver describes meeting the...

Life is fulfilling, but you are not in contact with life. Old contact is lost, new has not been made. You are in a transmission, hence you are so dull, hence life looks so mediocre, sad, boring - even futile. Says Jean-Paul Sartre: Man is a useless...

Compared with Anne Frank, or even Kugel himself, they seem like shadows contrived to make a point. The same is true of a secondary plot, about an arsonist on the loose, a device meant to deepen Kugel’s sense of danger in the world. But even more, the...

A couple of years ago, in the aftermath of a crisis in our personal world, my husband and I sold our house and cars, rented an apartment in the 9th arrondissement , and took off for Paris, children in tow. Paris in Love is about that year, a year I...

They do not die from external blows or domestic insurgencies. Instead, they tend to collapse from a strange internal malady – a combination of the elites’ encroaching disgust with themselves and a realization that the regime is exhausted. This Russian...