Garlic & Pearls

Suzanne explores dystopia, one of the most significant sub-genres of the British novel, where trouble often starts with the breakdown of the monarchy and aristocracy (which sounds a bit like France). It begins with Jonathan's Swift's Gulliver's Travels, then Mary Shelley comes along, the...

Muriel and Suzanne discuss a new French film set during the years 1940-41, a pivotal time in the history of France and Britain, as General de Gaulle, powered by 'a certain idea of France' and refusing to accept Pétain's new collaborationist regime, relocated to London to seek support from the Britis...

Suzanne enlightens Muriel about the Beaufort Scale and explores the remarkable story of its creator, hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who went to sea as a boy, was shipwrecked in the Far East, took part in Napoleonic sea battles against the French and in 1805 devised a brilliant empirical scale full o...

Camus’s terse 1942 novel about an enigmatic killing won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1957. It is entrenched as a French literary classic and as a gateway to Philosophy in French schools. But what, asks Muriel, do the book and its recent film adaptation by François Ozon tell us about morality, j...

Lashings of ginger beer all around and nostalgia galore as Suzanne explains the refreshing drink's quasi-parodic Famous Fives connection and unpicks the origins and history of ginger beer, taking in the trading of the exotic ginger root, its feeding into the British obsession with beer, fermenting a...

Muriel faces up to the melancholy that comes to us all towards the end of summer, and find a Gallic expression of it in the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, a huge bestseller and succès de scandale set on the French Riviera. The book launched the career of its teenage author Françoise Sagan – herself a...

Suzanne presents Muriel with the magnificent dome of scarlet studded with berries that is summer pudding and reveals the dessert's intriguing origins, which lie in 19th-century hydropathy. What inspired the British to deploy a plain, uncompromising pudding made of bread and native fruit as a health ...

What is the quintessential French summer food? Melon, of course, of the orange-fleshed and deeply aromatic variety. In the summer, Muriel explains, the French go into a sort of melon frenzy, chasing the perfect ambrosial experience, and this brings with it the agony of choice. Selecting the right me...

Can you hear the clarion call of a tinny version of 'Green Sleeves'? That familiar cheery chime is calling us to the ice cream van, plying its way all over the UK in the summer. Suzanne explores its history, its British-American mash-up of creativity, crucial Italian connection, technical chall...

The golden age of topless sunbathing in France lasted a little over a decade, from the 1970s to the tail end of the 1980s. French women pioneered it and were also first to abandon it. But how and why? Muriel retraces the story of a particular aspect of Gallic art de vivre which was highly codified a...