Faits divers

In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words.

I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or news in brief, published over the course of 1906 in Le Matin newspaper, are the work of a supreme stylist. Fénéon gravitated towards material that was violent, bloody and macabre, which he distilled into elegant, deadpan three-liners. Les Nouvelles en Trois Lignes was published last year as Novels in Three Lines in a translation by Luc Santé. Here’s an example of Fénéon’s epigrammatic genius:

There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who mistook the window for the door, is dead.

The winners below net £10 per entry printed.

Academics have warned schools not to teach
children to be patriotic,
As their country, academics presumably apart,
Has given its citizens too many bad examples.
Paul Griffin

Most popular

Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is keeping Trump waiting for a Ukraine deal

Tony Blair accepts huge fees as bank adviser,
Tony Blair accepts huge fees as insurance
company adviser,
So what did we expect, holy poverty maybe?
Brian Murdoch

McDonald’s are to offer fast McA-levels in
Burger Studies.
The new course will be as rigorous as other
new courses
With names ending in ‘Studies’.
Keith Norman

Some banks lent over backwards to provide
mortgages for people who couldn’t
repay them.
Eventually everyone owed everyone else.
Now nobody can borrow anything much.
W.J. Webster

No tiny tots, just tottering dodderers rocked
and rolled
In Manchester’s new ‘pensioners’ playground’,
where recreation for wrecks transforms
Creaky-hipped hobblers into hippy hoodlums.
Alan Millard

China paralysed by freak snowfalls. Millions
stranded in city stations as holiday
rush stymied.
President claims, ‘Everything under control.’
Lancashire man has to postpone trip.