Joanna Richardson

Despite sneers and some natural forebodings, writes Joanna Richardson, this brief alliance proved extremely happy.

During 1870-1871, the France of the Second Empire underwent one of those catastrophes from which nations strangely re-arise to greatness.

Joanna Richardson describes how after he had moved to Paris, Jacques Offenbach, the son of a cantor at the synagogue in Cologne, created an operatic epitome of the Second Empire.

Joanna Richardson describes how the last Emperor of the French died at Chislehurst, Kent; his son was killed in the British Zulu war.

Wit, diner-out, country clergyman and pugnacious liberal journalist, Sydney Smith, said Lord Melbourne, had ‘done more for the Whigs than all the clergy put together.’ Joanna Richardson revisits his reputation.

Joanna Richardson profiles a figure who carried her Republicanism to the edge, though not across the border, of Socialism.

Joanna Richardson takes the reader on a culinary tour of the French capital, asking why, for several centuries, Paris has been the gastronomic capital of the Western world.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.

Joanna Richardson describes the two visits of Zola to England. The writer first arrived in 1893 and again, five years later, during the Dreyfus Case.

Impressions of the social and literary scene in the French capital, as recorded by nineteenth-century visitors.