After 100 years, the mess we made of the Middle East is coming full circle

When I hear the words Sykes-Picot I more often than not feel like punching an Englishman or a Frog — any Englishman, any Frog — in the mouth, but then I think of François Georges-Picot’s granddaughter Olga, and my pugilistic thoughts turn to romantic mush. More about those two arrogant and ignorant fools later, but first Olga. I was 22 and she was 19 or 20 and we met in New York where she was studying acting and I was studying girls. It was love at first sight and we swore we’d never ever look at anyone else ever but then the summer ended and we never saw each other again. Well, I did see her but she was 20 feet tall and in Technicolor.

Twelve years after we first met, I went to see Freddie Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal in a cinema in Leicester Square, starring the wonderful Edward Fox as the paid assassin, and suddenly there was Olga falling off her horse on purpose in the Bois de Boulogne with her intended victim immediately coming to her aid.