Sublime

France’s longest-serving three-star chef, Paul Bocuse, received his stars back in 1965, and he still has them today. Thirty-five years without putting a foot wrong in the kitchen. The man deserves a medal for stamina.

Grasse was busy, crowded, and workmanlike. It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo, and Catherine de Médici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you’ve ever smelt a tannery

Crucial to the long success and ultimate failure of hunting-and-gathering bands is the fact that they had to operate on a very small scale over a very wide area. Foragers could survive only where population densities were light. To see why, think of the problems that larger groups would have posed. For one thing, a thousand hunters parading togethe

But what is the family? Already in Plato there were three major social functions: producing, reproducing, and defending.

Lose the concept of sacrifice within a society, and sooner or later marriage falters, parenthood declines, and the society slowly ages and dies. My

And so do some of the other veterans. Looking through the pages of the 2000 edition, you will find 116 establishments that were recommended in the original guide a hundred years ago. One of these monuments happens to be the Hotel d’Europe in Avignon, not far from us, and we thought it would be interesting to see how it was holding up under the weig

From all this it is clear that the gens was not an association of families, but that it was the family itself.

When the monasteries were swept away and the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became a problem,