News about Alexandre Dumas

For decades, Gérard Depardieu has been known as one of France 's greatest and most prolific actors, starring in hundreds of films, television productions and plays. The 75-year-old Oscar-nominated thespian has portrayed numerous historical and fictitious figures including Georges Danton, Joseph Stalin, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Christopher Columbus and Cyrano de Bergerac. This reputation as a French film great is perhaps only matched by his renown for impish behaviour, and over the years, the public - and Depardieu himself - have revelled in his wild excesses, including his drinking and womanising. He has over the years relieved himself in front of fellow passengers on a plane, boasted of his youth as a grave-robbing rent boy and cosied up to some of the world's most feared autocrats - including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. However, the limit of what many among the French public were willing to ascribe to his mischievous nature appeared to reach a limit when a series of women accused Depardieu of rape and sexual assault.

According to UK garden specialist Ciar Byrne, the camellia is one of the year's most popular shrubs with its eye-catching pink, white, and crimson blooms.

BRIAN VINER: Where were we? In the first instalment of French director Martin Bourboulon's lavish interpretation of The Three Musketeers, only eight months have passed since Cardinal Richelieu's spy, the beautiful, duplicitous Milady de Winter (Eva Green), crashed off the White Cliffs of Dover to her almost certain death. We knew, if only from the title of this second film's trailer, that Milady would return. Not literally since that would have been ridiculous, but perhaps just marginally less silly than the many ways in which death is actually cheating in this two-part French-language translation of Alexandre Dumas' celebrated 1844 novel. This time, the obscenely handsome D'Artagnan (Francois Civil), while desperately looking for his abducted bride Heart, the Queen's unidentified messenger, Conna Bonacieux (Lyna Khoudri), finds a dungeon containing Milady, and offers her the keys she needs to get home. In films like this, there are always a number of key characters, not just a key.

BRIAN VINER: It's been fifty years since the children of my generation fell in love with The Three Musketeers. Parts of Richard Lester's brilliantly 1973 swashbuckler, but not to a greater extent (at least in my own case) by the same year's feature-length Hanna-Barbera cartoon, which was inspired by the animated segment on Saturday morning's Banana Splits show, we were taken to a new and blessed memory. Of those of us who came to know D'Artagnan chiefly as a lantern-jawed pen-and-ink figure (or in Lester's film as a titical Michael York) I should note that a tiny minority has actually read Alexandre Dumas' original 1844 novel.

'This book will introduce you to the destinations that have enshrined Paris's reputation as a cultural capital.' Sandrine Voillet writes in the introduction to her book, Literary Landscapes Paris, which was published by Pavilion, shedding a spotlight on the French capital's most coveted bookshops, as well as exploring nearby literary establishments and the city's'storied streets.' After reading this book, Voillet says, "I'm sure you'll be drawn to Paris."

Albert Read (pictured) is reading Michael Frayn's book Towards The End Of The Morning by Michael Frayn. Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time, the managing director of Conde Nast UK and author, will fly to a desert island. The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas first gave him the reading bug