Turkey, a NATO member, about to get drawn into this conflict as well as Iran. Then what? Then what? A complete and utter failure of American and Western diplomacy and foreign policy stretching back decades. A nightmare.

Barnier facing his first test in front of the Assemblée Nationale today, announcing his <<politique générale>>. And according to what I can gather from the papers here, it’s going to be a very close call whether his government can actually survive.

“La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.”

‘The understsnding is that they’re not going to do another Gaza.’ I am not a complete innocent; but this particular formation of words gives off a cynicism so deep it feels depraved.

Something very satisfying about reading coverage of our royal family purely through the fromt pages of French gossip magazines:

The Conservative party is still firmly stuck in the Denial stage of political grief, and I for one am not very anxious to help them to move on from it.

Cirque de Gavarnie

As UK/US found in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, when you assassinate the senior leaders of a large terrorist network, what you tend to get is fragmentation, and often the emergence of more radical and even more ruthless groups.

I’m not going to shed any tears for Nasrallah, but statements from Washington that praise Israel for killing him and completely ignore the wider consequences of this assassination for the region and the world just seem deeply unhelpful to me.

I don’t suppose it’s either here or there now, but people might be interested in the actual circumstances of the composition and painting of Van Gogh’s Arles (1888) ‘Sunflowers’ and the January 1889 ‘repetitions’.