Richard Assheton

1 week ago | observer.co.uk | Richard Assheton

Driven out by turmoil at home or lured by economic opportunities, more Central and South Americans have made the Spanish capital their home The sun went down and one of Madrid’s better-known flamenco bars started blasting out rhythms of a more Latin persuasion. “At lunchtime they play flamenco. In the evening it’s salsa,” says Victor Rocha Laporta, a fashionably dressed Venezuelan estate agent. He was in a good mood.

1 week ago | airmail.news | Richard Assheton

In a shop selling lobster pâté on the Île d’Yeu—a 12-square-mile patch of beach and whitewashed houses off the French west coast—you can buy a can of local air. That’s how much its devotees love the place. But it remains somewhat of a secret. Even in France, few could locate Île d’Yeu on a map. (It is near the more well-known Île de Ré, off the Vendée.)Yet it attracts quite a set.

1 month ago | thetimes.com | Richard Assheton

1 month ago | thetimes.com | Richard Assheton

1 month ago | airmail.news | Richard Assheton

At the Café de la Banque in Marseille it had just gone 8pm and Manon Rouvillois was on to her third cigarette. Or fourth. “I don’t count them,” she laughed. Rouvillois, 31, has been smoking since she was 14. “You smoke your first cigarettes because it’s cool,” she said. “From the age of 15 it was really regular.” Her parents were “very anti-smoking … but they quickly accepted it”. A graphic designer, she gets through ten or fifteen a day, the first with a coffee on her balcony before breakfast.