Joanna Biggs

‘Love,’ Alain Badiou wrote, ‘is the minimal form of communism.’ In communism for two or for two billion, the way the gulf between people narrows is of great interest: both scenarios seem to involve mysterious and transformative forces. I remembered Badiou’s formulation when I heard Sally Rooney describe the genesis of her books. Her characters don’t arrive...

In the summer of​ 1975, the Nigerian-born British novelist Buchi Emecheta went missing for a day. She tucked £10 into her purse and went to Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter...

The​ problem with biography is that it’s impossible. Have you ever tried to write down the thoughts, the emotions, the memories that bubble up in a person over sixty seconds; where she is; what she’s wearing; what she can smell, taste and hear; who she’s with; what she’s saying; not to mention what contribution this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of...

At​ the end of the Catacombs, having walked among the bones of six million Parisians, you come to a single gravestone. Somewhere in the ossuary are the remains of Racine, Charlotte Corday, Robespierre and Montesquieu, yet the only monument is to Françoise Gillain, who, you discover, died in 1821 after spending years trying to free a writer unjustly held in the Bastille. Arriving at...

It’s​ a while since I saw Cléo de 5 à 7, but I remember that it opens with a tarot spread. The tarot reader draws cards in groups of three, for past, present and future. The young woman with her, Cléo Victoire, her blonde hair elaborately curled back onto her head like a Parisian Dusty Springfield, bites her fingers, covers her face, and after confessing that...