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Other Men's Flowers
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Comments on language, literature, politics, the arts and almost anything else, but mostly quotations. "I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own" (Montaigne, 1533-1592)
Recent Posts Tagged With 'francophilia'
Chez Muse
Earlier in the month I published a post about Renoir's film La Bête Humaine and my happy discovery on the net of a song from it together with the lyrics. That recording was only one out of hundreds of French songs contained in a remarkable website w...
A soldier\'s farewell to his mother
What is the English title of the old song known to the French as Les adieux du soldat?It goes:C'est l'adieu, petite mèreDe ton gars qui va partirIl prévoit la peine amèreQue ton coeur devra souffrirMais je sais que ta vaillancePortera ce gros chag...
La Grande Traversée
Tomorrow will be the centenary of Louis Blériot's crossing of the Channel in his eleventh contraption. No doubt the Daily Mail will be making much of this anniversary, as it was this paper which offered the £1,000 prize for the first powered crossi...
Funny how things work out
As I mentioned the other day, I used to review West End plays from time to time for a chain of provincial weekly newspapers, and once I was sent to Les Trois Mousquetaires at the Piccadilly Theatre. This was a burlesque of 17th century swashbucklers ...
The Man with Three Balls
The French were a little hasty in congratulating themselves on escaping the worst effects of the credit crunch through their aversion to credit cards and their generally prudent attitude towards debt, but it was without a trace of schadenfreude that ...
Métropolitain
Living in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century can't have been much fun. The Métro was being built and most of it wasn't tunnelled like the London Underground but by various cut-and-cover methods, particularly using steel caissons which...
Paris Belle Epoque
My friend Thierry Fournier has lived in England for 57 years, and, together with his wife Ginette, is completely attuned to the twenty-first century zeitgeist of the Home Counties; nevertheless they remain cent pour cent lyonnais and parisienne respe...
Global meltdown
The world panics, but not Le Monde, which has this:...
Police constables and personal computers
...and political correctness; it's a handy abbreviation with several uses and there is one more which will be kept for a later post.We keep colloquial abbreviations like that one for things which are prevalent or familiar, but everything must be name...
Cuckold
This is an unsatisfactory word, since it applies not to one who has cuckolded somebody else, but to one who was passively cuckolded. I think the verb is at fault, not the noun—why not use cuckoldise, or cuckoldate?You might say that there is a para...
Psycho Buildings
Having enjoyed the free exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, we still had some time to kill so we forked out for the one you had to pay for. The art works in Psycho Buildings are said to be "by turns visceral, pungent, meditative, absurd, threatening a...
