When I first heard that the BBC was remaking Civilisation, the groundbreaking 1969 documentary in which esteemed art historian Kenneth Clark guides the viewer through a thousand years of European culture, I feared the worst. When I saw that they…
DON’T LOOK NOW, but we just might be witnessing the tentative first steps toward the beginning of a mini-revolution in France. In the land of the cherished 35-hour workweek and five weeks of vacation, brave souls are starting to question…
THE NUGATIOUS PRESIDENT of France, François Hollande, only one year into his five-year term, has again managed to raise Gallic hackles over what should have been a fairly routine matter, to wit, issuing a new postage stamp. Many of the…
IT WOULD BE hard to find a better symbol of the relative decline of American influence and the rise of Chinese sway than the attractive building on this piece of prime Paris real estate. Located on an elegant, tree-lined boulevard…
After Barack Obama’s flop at the G20 last week in Saint Petersburg, where he failed to persuade a single leader of the world’s industrialized nations to get involved in still another Middle East civil war, John Kerry brought his dog…
WITH WELL-ARMED radical Islamist insurgents closing in last winter on Mali’s capital, Bamako, French President François Hollande suddenly decided to defend Western civilization. Plunging in the polls as the most unpopular French president since the Fifth Republic was founded in…
France is the land of great medieval cathedrals par excellence, and over the years they have awed me with their grandeur, both spiritual and temporal. Would-be progressives today would have us believe that the Middle Ages were a Hobbesian hell…
ONLY ONE YEAR INTO his presidency, François Hollande, France’s bland, indecisive, but stubbornly doctrinaire socialist leader, is already setting records. Admittedly they are not the sort of milestones that the French were hoping for when they voted him into office…
April in Paris is supposed to be about chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees, warm embraces. Sometimes it actually is, but this year is definitely different. Parisians are shivering and even more morose than ever as a month-long…
Compared with some of the more spectacular Franco-American clashes, this spat was relatively small-time. It wasn’t Charles de Gaulle abruptly kicking NATO headquarters out of Paris in the 1960s and withdrawing French troops from the alliance’s military command, much to…