Our spring 2015, coast-to-coast extravaganza to celebrated the publication of A PASSION FOR PARIS: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light, starts on April…
Join us at one of America's premier gourmet, organic restaurants, Piedmont Restaurant, in Durham, South Carolina, for an extraordinary feast featuring my new…
Now and then, then and now… The scene opens with thousands of “love locks” glinting on a bridge spanning the Seine. Competing accordionists play…
photos courtesy Alison Harris A couple of jpegs of Le Figaro. They show “the best-loved most widely read writers” in France. Guess who…
A Passion for Paris: Romance at Bagatelle David Downie, March 2015 Were Romance and Romanticism in Paris born at the Bagatelle, possibly the…
George Sand was the "Great Woman" of the Romantic Age, according to Victor Hugo. If anyone could make that claim it was Hugo. Successful,…
Bonjour! I can’t help sharing this rave, starred review in the notoriously "difficult" (discerning?) Kirkus Reviews: KIRKUS REVIEW Join Downie (Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim…
Is theater in Paris romantic and Romantic? Yes indeed, Romantic with a capital “R” as in Romanticism and the Great Romantics.…
The Arsenal Library in Paris The Age of Romanticism lives on in Paris, in the streets, parks, buildings and cityscape—and in the hearts and…
Louis XVI shown as a glutton, Revolutionary era caricature Caricature has always been a dangerous business in France: starting from the earliest days of…
The spirit of 1789–and 1830, 1848, 1871, 1944, 1968 and 2015 (not to mention a dozen dates in ancient, medieval, and pre-modern history–lives on. When…
Blame Nadar: his noir—noir et blanc I should say—influence helped lure me to Paris way back when. I wanted to take up residence in…
