CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
RODIN And His Poets
CHAPTER ONE - The Man Who Made Stone Breathe
Auguste Rodin
Paris, 1840
He was born into a Paris that still smelled of coal smoke and river mud, in a city that had...
A Miracle in Kagoshima
Satsuma Gyu: The Quiet Empire at the Edge of Japan
At the southern end of Kyushu, where the old provinces of Satsuma once looked out across the East China Sea, the...
Rubia Gallega: The Slow Beef of the Atlantic Coast
In the green, rain-washed hills of Galicia — where the Atlantic rolls against a coast of granite and pine, and the weather seems always to be...
The Scent of Greene Papaya
Vietnam Voices
“The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul.”
— Graham Greene
"Không có chuyện gì xảy ra, nhưng mọi thứ diễn ra thật...
The View From Nowhere
A philosophical investigation into perception, thought, and being
The eye cannot see itself.
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.633
For Canard
I absolutely adore ducks; I’ve nibbled on their webs and sucked on their tongues in...
Lo Bak Go: The Golden Cake That Crossed the Sea
Chinese Fried Radish Cake (蘿蔔糕)
Few dishes tell a story quite as quietly, or as completely, as lo bak go. To look at it on the...
The Alchemy of Steam: The Story of Xiao Long Bao (小笼包)
You never forget your first taste of the little pleated dumpling filled with soup and pork, known as xiaolongbao. This is ostensibly because it...
