Where is My Fire Engine, Thieving Gypsy Lady?!
I am can only give you a roundup of the impressive fascism-on-the-march news this week, since it have all been so busy, but you should all be inspire and motivate by seeing some of the most important people in Europe FINALLY doing some moves to promote the escape [...]

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale.
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making [...]

Thierry Henry, 32
FIFA Footballer of the Year 2010
What is Va-Va-Voom? Va-Va-Voom is doing things with style, with flair, panache, a certain je ne sais quoi. Who can say? Not me. I am not the ref.
Gillette Mach 4 Turbo: Now that’s what I call a close shave.

I do a lot of work for charity, you know. [...]

Sometimes a team needs a leader, to take a game into their hands and turn it around. For France, Henry was that man. A disorganised and unmotivated French side were harried and fraught by an under-valued Irish team, but extra time put the win up for grabs – and it was the French who reached [...]

When newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy named Bernard Kouchner Minister for Foreign Affairs in May 2007 there were few eyebrows raised. It had been an open secret in French political circles for weeks beforehand and it later transpired that Sarkozy had offered Kouchner the job before the election – an election during which Kouchner [...]

After they read my objective and accurate description of France last week on this very site, the French Tourist Board was being so impressed that they invite me to come to their country’s capital, Paris, to see for myself how much efforts they have been making in the past seven days in order to improve [...]

The most striking thing about Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy is how little it is about Nicolas Sarkozy. This will disappoint those who are expecting a savage evisceration of the personality of the little man in the Élysée Palace. I suspect that Badiou saw a canny way of sneaking his call for an embrace [...]

Si. Is the Future King of Lyon!
I am watching with disgust and pleasure the vaguely general striking in France yesterday. Did you see it? Was all most very amusing and also a big disgrace.
In general, as you know, I am always opposed to the insurrectioning by members of the lower classes, such [...]

Another year at the movies and another good one. Too often we hear jeremiads about the decline of cinema and the lack of good films out there (of course, such gripes are usually based on a diet of English-language cinema, which is far from being the world’s most interesting at the best of times). But [...]