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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale interviews Woody Johnson, the former American Ambassador to the UK, about a possible second Trump term (1:19); Lara Prendergast reflects on the issue of smartphones for children and what lessons we could learn from Keir Starmer’s approach to privacy (6:35); reviewing Patrick Bishop’s book ‘Paris ’44: The Shame
The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks
Telling the story of Sir Roger Casement’s life is a challenge for any biographer. In the land of his birth, he is remembered as a national hero. His remains lie in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin beside the graves of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is there because he was hanged in Pentonville
In September 1944, a few months after being greeted by cheering crowds in Paris, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of the wartime État Français, was driven across the German frontier into exile under Gestapo escort. He no longer had access to the national radio service, so, as he passed through France, typed copies of his
For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The enchantment dates back to the end of the 19th century, when ‘le bordel de l’Europe’, in words quoted by Marie-José Gransard, was transformed into ‘la capitale de l’amour’. In Twentieth Century Paris she traces the
Before the horrified gaze of its militants, the French Socialist party — which has been a major force in French politics since 1981, and forms the present government — is falling to pieces. There are many reasons behind this catastrophe. They go back to 2005 and the dithering leadership of the then secretary-general, François Hollande,
The result in France in the first round of the Les Républicains party’s primary elections marks the political death of one of the big beasts of French politics. Nicolas Sarkozy, widely known as ‘Sarko’, has been a volcanic presence on the public stage since he became Jacques Chirac’s minister of the interior in May 2002.
Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about
In France, Brexit has provoked resentment and shock. For many years-Britain has been seen in both Paris and-Brussels as the European ‘bad boy’, out for what it can get and intending to give as little as possible in return. The first news was greeted with headlines such as ‘Can Europe-survive?’ but there was also a
Paris Sitting on a crowded café terrace in Rue Saint-Antoine on a sunny evening last week, there was no sense of national crisis. When a motor scooter backfired, no one jumped. The constant racket of police car sirens was ignored. The National Assembly had just voted for the third extension of a seven-month ‘national emergency’ following
Approximately 500 new books on Venice are published every year and this is not the first literary anthology devoted to the city. But Marie-Jose Gransard lectures in Venice about Venice to Venetians, and conducts her students on guided tours of the city. Her selection draws on sources going back over 800 years and across six
The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard, who lived in Paris for over 40 years, once wrote an affectionate portrait of his adopted home that opened with the defiant words, ‘Yes: I like it here.’ As a short review of the city
The terrorist attacks of 13 November have had an enduring effect on people living in Paris and France’s other big cities. Hotel bookings and restaurant reservations are down, and some people will no longer go out in the evening. There have been several other minor terrorist outrages across the country since November, and tension —
When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of
A year has passed since Nicolas Sarkozy announced his return to frontline politics, and the political landscape in France is still recovering from the shock. His rivals for the leadership of the French right have watched while their cordially disliked ex-leader consistently outmanoeuvred them. They had made the mistake of believing in the sincerity of
In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed. Confining his research to three
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist. Achebe objected to a story that used Africa as a setting for ‘the break-up of one petty European mind’, and depicted Africans as nameless savages. Achebe’s lecture —
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, widely known as DSK, formerly France’s minister of the economy and finance, ex-director-general of the International Monetary Fund, frontrunner as Socialist candidate in the presidential elections of 2012, is a broken man. Or so it would seem. He was acquitted last week by the Lille criminal court of aggravated pimping and organising an
In his more hyperactive moods Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, has been known to compare himself to Charles de Gaulle. Following defeat in the 2012 presidential elections ‘Sarko’ made a dignified exit from the national stage, stating that in future his personal commitment to the well-being of France would be in some loftier sphere.
By 1940 Irène Némirovsky, who had arrived in France at the age of 16 as a refugee from Kiev, had become a prominent and successful novelist. In March of that year she celebrated what was to be her final publication day. She was Jewish, and for French publishers under Nazi occupation she had ceased to
