Julia McFarlane

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503 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 16 Jan

Julia McFarlane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.

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Global News Podcast · Zohran Mamdani wins New York mayoral race · 5 Nov 2025 podcast

And so it's partly that.

And also, these are very beautiful places, you know, in a very in the most dense city in Europe.

These are places where you can have sort of pastoral walks.

Although they're graveyards, they're very nice places to be.

Nice places, but also in many parts of them quite run down, aren't they?

And so you have a lot of tombstones, like in almost any cemetery, that you can't read the inscriptions on that have become very dilapidated.

And so, you know, after a while, the tomb will be regarded as abandoned and can be removed and replaced.

But that is, you know, quite a bureaucratic hassle.

So given that, what do you think the sort of the feeling in Paris is of this plan by the council?

I mean, it's, you know, I'm sure Parisians who are enormously proud of their city are proud of these cemeteries.

I mean, do they think that it's a good idea that people who, I mean, presumably need a fair bit of money to be able to afford to do this,

get the chance to, you know, enter a lottery, pay for the right to both do up an existing dilapidated grade, but then also get the right to be buried among the real celebrities.

Well, it was voted unanimously in Paris City Council, which is quite rare.

But yeah, I mean, anything that requires spending a lot of money, which favors the rich, doesn't tend to go down terrifically well in France.

And, you know, if you want to restore the old grave and then buy yourself a grave in perpetuity, it will cost you somewhere over 20,000 euros, which is not for everyone.

And it's all part of the status game of Paris.

You know, status is very important here.

Status depends partly on where you live and status is also where you are buried.

And so, yeah, it's not reserved for everyone.

You recently wrote a lovely piece for the Financial Times about the attraction of these cemeteries, but in particular in a sort of rather haunting fashion, actually.

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