In two days time, six-power talks on Iran and its putative military nuclear programme are to be held in Germany, so I thought a little background to this show of international indignation might not go amiss… In 1974, in the midst of the cold war, America gave France permission to provide Iran, whose northern border [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
France – Iran, a fusional relationship.
Posted in Uncategorized on August 31, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Le Dauphin
Posted in Uncategorized on August 28, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I like this photo of Chirac and Sarko taken in 1981. Chirac is 49 and pleased as punch. Sarko is 26 and struggling. With many things. His hair is but one of them.
De Retour
Posted in Uncategorized on August 27, 2009 | 15 Comments »
I’m back in France after the longest time spent in England since I left twenty five years ago. My two and a half months in the motherland has left me dazed and confused and as far as this blog is concerned, mute for weeks on end. In writing about my understanding of France, I have [...]
The Delete Button
Posted in Uncategorized on August 5, 2009 | 13 Comments »
I have a confession to make. I came home yesterday and found that someone had added the following comment to my last post: “This blog is as dull as it sounded in the newspaper.” Tired and emotional after a long day and a sleepless night, turning the spaghetti with one hand, I deleted with the [...]
Lacunae
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art de vivre, French cuisine, gastronomy, schadenfreude on July 30, 2009 | 7 Comments »
I have been asked how I could have written a book about France without writing about food. I think the answer is simply that I felt it had been done so often before – and in some cases very well – that I didn’t think there was much point. What I did hope to do [...]
This is not a swimming pool
Posted in Uncategorized on July 11, 2009 | 18 Comments »
The other day I took my four year-old son for a swimming lesson in the public baths close to where I’m staying in Suffolk. Florine, a fourteen year-old French girl who is over for a week from the village where I live in France, came with me. This was my son’s third lesson and he [...]
Learning curve
Posted in Uncategorized on June 26, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I’ve been in England for two weeks, promoting this book about France and two encounters with British broadsheets have given me an interesting lesson in the workings of the media in this country. The first newspaper contacted my publishers offering to run an ‘extract’ from the book. Great excitement all round: it was every writer’s [...]
Le Culte de L’Argent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alain Peyrefitte, Aristotle, chrematistics, Derrida, Georges Pompidou, Le culte de l'argent, Montesquieu, oikonomia on June 20, 2009 | 8 Comments »
A friend of mine – who happens to be a philosophy professor (bear with me) - recently explained to me a philosophical distinction, first made by Aristotle between two visions of money and its role in society. The one he (Aristotle) called oikonomia (economics) and the other he called khrematisike (chrematistics). The first, basically, is [...]
Non-dits
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged non-dits on June 7, 2009 | 23 Comments »
Anti-Semitism in France is a strange and elusive beast. It seems to shift and mutate, changing shape with each new generation. Today, you might find it lying just below the surface of José Bové’s otherwise legitimate struggle against cultural hegemony, beneath the worthy concern for France’s disenfranchised Arabs, or lurking behind the Parisian intellectual’s critique [...]
Cold Shower
Posted in Uncategorized on June 6, 2009 | 7 Comments »
In response to a chapter of the book that was published this month in Prospect Magazine, Arthur Goldhammer cautions me: “Ms. Wadham needs to take a cold shower. True, Yasmina Reza did overhear Sarko telling another pol that “nous [referring to the French political class as a whole] sommes des bêtes sexuelles.” But the president [...]
Shameless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Balkan, Montenegro, shameless, thigh boots on June 2, 2009 | 2 Comments »
When I began this blogging caper I told myself that I would eschew all shameless airing of my personal laundry in public and stick to the honest business of self-promotion. But I can’t help it. The giddying sense of a vast, anonymous audience hanging on my every word is too much for me…I have to [...]
Five Foot, Six Inches
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged five foot six, French libido on May 19, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I’ve been asked to clarify the notion of the sex dwarf. As I said when I first began to write about the current French president, the term is not meant to be disparaging. It may seem a little disingenuous to say that it is meant as a compliment, but it’s true. I see Nicolas Sarkozy [...]
Reconstructed Female seeks Unreconstructed male
Posted in French society, the book, Uncategorized, tagged 9 1/2 weeks, Finkielkraut, Frenchmen, gender relations, L'amour a la francaise, reconstructed female, The Game of Love, unreconstructed male on May 12, 2009 | 14 Comments »
Two female friends wrote to me recently, deploring the mutual bafflement that was coming between themselves and their boyfriends. One of them was French with an Englishman and the other, English with a Frenchman. “It’s good to notice that even a British women has come across the problem of repressed English boys!” wrote La Francaise. [...]
Seven Ways to Laugh in French
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bodhisattva in metro, christine rabette, glousser, pouffer, rigoler, rire, s'esclaffer, se marrer, se tordre on May 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Rire, rigoler, glousser, pouffer, s’esclaffer, se tordre, se marrer… Question: Where is Christine Rabette‘s fantasy more likely to happen? a) the Metro b) the Tube c) the Subway
The Work Life Divide
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged intellectual dictatorship, TF1, work life divide on May 8, 2009 | 3 Comments »
A bizarre poll, claiming to take the temperature of the nation after two years of Super-Sarko, reveals that a large majority (75%) admire the man for his ‘courage’ and ‘dynamism’ and at the same time, condemn the president (73%) for his inability to ‘listen’ and ‘to solve the problems of the French people.’ TF1 posted [...]
Lucy Wadham
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