France
Tears and terror on the front line of the French wildfires
Provence As soon as I opened my front door I could smell it. Along the path, flakes of white ash…
Won’t someone please think of the French wine?
There was something surreal about my visit to La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux’s wine museum, last Saturday. From the top…
Legal organ harvesting is just a PR campaign away
Summertime, and the living isn’t as easy as it used to be. The dying, though, is getting easier, especially if…
Patrick Bruel and the death of French seduction
Patrick Bruel was once a heartthrob pop star whose dark brooding looks fuelled a ‘Bruelmania’ fever that swept through France…
Macron could’ve done more to stop the Bordeaux fires
Firefighters in France have spent the weekend trying to save Bordeaux from an immense conflagration. On Monday morning, the city’s…
Trapped with the plane passengers from Hell
Provence Under late June’s ferocious heat dome, during what turned out to be an almost eight-hour drive to join Martin…
Why is Giorgia Meloni courting Emmanuel Macron?
Emmanuel Macron has lost a friend in Keir Starmer. The French President paid tribute to the outgoing British Prime Minister…
Storm warnings for Burnham from the weathermen of Basel
Reading the annual economic report of the Bank for International Settlements while lying beside a pool with an Aperol spritz…
France’s ideological war on air conditioning
America is to blame for the heatwave that has caused so much misery in France in the last fortnight. Audrey…
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
In a luxurious French villa, a man lies dead, shot with his own gun – and his wife and son become suspects. But new information emerges every time the scene is reviewed
Reading Jeremy’s words only gets harder
Provence In the hope of renting out the main cave house during the summer, I’ve been clearing to make room…
What do the French see in Ireland?
As the eco-tourism season got under way, the confused-looking French people began to arrive. They come to see ‘la nature’,…
France is throwing a tantrum at Trump
France is intensifying its counter-offensive against what it calls misinformation. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors confirmed they have opened a…
People who say it’s no good throwing money at a problem have never been poor
It started during the bus journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh airport on the way home to Provence. Saying goodbye is…
De Gaulle or nothing: lessons from the General
The first time I set foot in the White House as a Labour political adviser, in spring 2024, to see…
Making Tax Difficult: another Whitehall farce
Welcome to the new tax year, with its overflowing hamper of half-baked, growth-eating, enterprise-crushing Labour measures. And if you happen…
The joy of meeting ‘randomers’
Provence Life was complicated when I fled to Provence in November 2014 with no job and very little money. At…
Iran and the crisis in the European mind
The politics of the Iranian war feature an observable gap between interest and action for nearly all parties. The Americans…
Fractured loyalties: The Tribe, by Michael Arditti, reviewed
A powerful Jewish family flee Salonika in 1912 – only to fall apart in France on the eve of the second world war
Revenge of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys
French President Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating rose by six points last week. It will likely continue to climb following his…
Americans are erasing European culture
Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was…
Am I a Zionist?
The death of Quentin Deranque is strangely under-reported here. He was a 23-year-old beaten up in Lyon on 12 February…
British politics is turning French
An editorial in Friday’s Le Figaro (France’s equivalent to the New York Times) is headlined “Mélenchon or the moral suicide…
France can no longer ignore the menace of left-wing violence
Police in France arrested nine people on Tuesday evening in connection with the death of a 23-year-old student in Lyon…
France has a nasty case of Trump Derangement Syndrome
The French IT giant Capgemini has put its US subsidiary on sale because of its association with the work of…
