Gavin Mortimer

Two years ago I wrote on this platform that France is the most ‘dangerous European country for Jews’ – and so it remains. Anti-Semitic attacks in 2018 soared by 74 per cent on the previous year and the figures for the beginning of 2019 have revealed a 78 per cent increase on the same period

Five years on from the horrific Charlie Hebdo massacre in which a dozen people lost their lives, politicians have been busy showcasing their sanctimony. Socialist mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo urged people ‘never to forget’ the price the cartoonists paid for the courage. Yet only last week, Hidalgo used Twitter to express her ‘profound shock’ at

France has endured an appalling series of Islamist terror attacks in recent years. One might feel a sense of relief that the country escaped relatively lightly last Friday. That will, of course, be no consolation to the family of the man who was killed by 22-year-old Nathan C, a recent convert to Islam, who stabbed

Boris Johnson may have received a lukewarm reaction from Emmanuel Macron to his emphatic election victory last month but one French politician was cock-a-hoop at the result. Shortly after the scale of the Conservative win was clear, Marine Le Pen tweeted her delight, declaring that ‘the crushing victory of Boris Johnson shows that neither manoeuvring nor

East Germans had a name for their version of ‘woke’ culture’; it was Zersetzung, or ‘decomposition’ in English. It was a form of psychological warfare deployed against citizens suspected of ‘subversive incitement’. There were several techniques to Zersetzung but probably the most effective was what the Stasi described as the ‘systematic discrediting of public reputation’ by

Remember when Boris Johnson met Emmanuel Macron for the first time as Prime Minister? It was in August and, as the Guardian made clear to its readers, it was the French president calling the shots. The newspaper illustrated its point with a photograph of the two leaders at their lecterns, the French president looking statesmanlike

I’ve just finished reading William Manchester’s absorbing memoir about the Pacific War. ‘Goodbye Darkness’ is a reminder of just how brutal that campaign was, particularly the battle for Okinawa in 1945, where Americans and Japanese fought in hand-to-hand combat in conditions that Manchester likened to Passchendaele. There was one key difference though: in the East China

I had supper on Saturday with an old friend. She’s a committed French socialist, a schoolteacher in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, the most impoverished department in France. She’s relatively new to the profession, having decided in her late thirties that teaching was her calling. So she went back to university and upon qualifying she

Who was the bright spark who thought it would be a good idea to hold this weekend’s G7 summit in Biarritz? At the height of summer? Normally in August the population of this Atlantic coastal resort in France’s Basque country balloons from 25,000 to more than 110,000. But not this year. Admittedly the arrival in