It’s the French writer’s birthday, but if you don’t have time to devour all 91 titles in his magnum opus The Human Comedy, Ronald K. Fried picks three of the novels that speak to the current moment.

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In the mid-1840s, in a melancholy mood about the series of modernisations he was witnessing in Paris, Honoré de ...

No adequate biography of Honoré de Balzac has yet been written ; a fact somewhat strange, considering the interest and attractiveness of the subject and the abundance of the material available. Of ...

There exists a late work by Balzac that has long been known by the rather sensational title *The Splendors and Miseries of ...

Thinking about Balzac through Dungeons and Dragons helps make visible a logic of character creation that is often taken for ...

Hotel Balzac—a sultry, modernist boutique with ties to that Balzac—brings a taste of the Champs Élysées's Golden Era back to the shopping promenade. It's rare that a hotel can stick to a palette of ...

Coffee! It is the great uniting force of my Daily Rituals book. It’s what brings together Beethoven and Proust, Glenn Gould and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gustav Mahler. This should hardly be ...