The Israel-Iran phoney war took a dramatic turn last week when Transport minister Shaul Mofaz said that if Iran’s nuclear weapons programme continues, Israel will attack. Mofaz is one of three deputy Prime Ministers with pretensions to the current incumbent Ehud Olmert’s position. Though Israel attacked Saddam’s Iraq in 1981 in similar circumstances, the […]

Some films benefit from a second viewing; for my own part, among those that I didn’t ‘get’ first time round are classics such as Repulsion, Vertigo and Heaven’s Gate, films that I now view as undeniably great. But when I got wind, a couple of years back, of Michael Haneke’s intention to remake his horror […]

A quick word on the Oscars, if only because ignoring them in the week of this site’s inauguration would be just a little too perverse. I didn’t deign to actually watch the ceremony - the last time I bothered staying up that late the winner was Titanic and, as I’m sure you can guess, the […]

Every so often last year I would take the Metro line 9 out to its terminus in Montreuil – a suburb just east of the confines of Paris – to teach, at the town hall, one of the mayoral staff, a rather reluctant student, who needed to brush up on his English for the many […]