Mbappé's Michael Jordan moment: "Republicans, buy shoes too."

A Japanese professor, Noako Sano, teaches Occitan history, culture, and grammar to a couple of dozen students at Aichi Prefectural University. She even put together a Japanese-Occitan dictionary after first encountering the regional language during her student days in Montpellier and later deepening her knowledge in Toulouse. There's something quietly striking about a language that's been clinging on in southern France - mostly among older speakers, with little reliable passage to the next generation - finding serious attention and actual students half a world away. The same quiet attrition has worn down other regional languages in France: Breton, Basque, Corsican, Alsatian. Historical pressure toward a single national tongue did much of the damage; weak day-to-day use and thin institutional backing have kept it going. It reminds me of living in Strasbourg, Alsace, where the practical work of keeping Alsatian alive still falls largely to grandparents, who pass it along to the grandchildren alongside French and German. Family effort becomes the last thin thread holding a once-everyday Germanic dialect.

There is no known record of actual conversations between Niven and Quayle (or others) on the Guns of Navarone set about their wartime experiences - sorry, @mschriner and @monstroso. A decent overview of the cast and crew's service appears in a YouTube documentary "The Real Commandos Behind the 1961 Guns of Navarone." Alongside Niven and Quayle, it covers James Robertson Justice (Spanish Civil War and RNVR, invalided out after a shrapnel wound), Allan Cuthbertson (RAAF, 1941–47), and director J. Lee Thompson (RAF Bomber Command tail gunner and wireless operator). Both David Niven and Anthony Quayle were characteristically reticent about their wartime service. Niven touched on his Commandos and Phantom Regiment experiences only lightly in his 1971 memoir The Moon's a Balloon. Quayle avoided public discussion altogether; the closest he came for decades was the lightly fictionalised account in his 1945 novel Eight Hours from England. Only in his 1990 memoirs A Time to Speak did he address his service more directly. At one time, while researching inter-war British intelligence, I met a few SOE historians in the seminar room, including M.R.D. Foot, the leading authority on the organisation. He mentioned Quayle's brief SOE posting in Albania. Apparently there's a record and Quayle's personnel file in the National Archives (notably in the HS series). Those files cover the New Year's Eve drop at Tragjas, his work with the partisans, and his evacuation after illness. Another historian of the Balkan theatre, Roderick Bailey in The Wildest Province, treat Quayle as one of the officers sent into Albania in 1943–44, though the episode remains a minor rather than central part of the broader SOE story. There's also a 2021 article by Jonathan Best in Intelligence and National Security ("The tortuousness of our Albanian allies" - vol 36 No.3) that uses Quayle's Eight Hours from England to examine the difficulties SOE faced in Albania - especially the inability to work effectively with competing communist and anti-communist groups more interested in fighting each other than the Axis. It also traces the personal cost of the mission, charting Quayle's shift from optimism to disillusionment and eventual abhorrence of his Albanian allies after repeated setbacks and betrayals. Hope this helps.

Standing up to those with epistemic privilege. 😏

The great Shakespearean actor Sir John Gielgud once summed up Richard Burton's baritone voice in a single, luminous way: "the voice which would sing like a violin and with a bass that could shake the floor." The image is exact. Burton's voice was a richly resonant baritone with a natural Welsh lilt that Burton refined through rigorous training (projecting Shakespeare across valleys as a youth) yet never fully erased. It gave it an authentic, coal-dusted timbre that evoked the valleys of his upbringing. This duality made it electrifying on stage in Shakespearean roles like Hamlet, Henry V, and Coriolanus, where its range conveyed everything from introspective melancholy to commanding fury. On screen, where its measured, weary cadence - often laced with cigarettes, whisky, and world-weariness -added mythic weight to characters in films like The Robe, Becket, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Where Eagles Dare. In an era of increasingly naturalistic acting, Burton's voice stood out as a throwback to grand theatrical tradition while feeling viscerally modern and personal -making him one of the last true vocal giants of the screen.

For Guns of Navarone, they built the entire interior of the gun emplacement as a large set at Shepperton Studios. The full interior (including the massive guns and working elevator) was constructed in the studio, with the huge cave entrance built outdoors on the Shepperton backlot because it was too large for a soundstage. The Telegraph described the guns set as one of the biggest ever built for a British film at the time - a three-storey structure. The exteriors were filmed on Rhodes, Greece. telegraph.co.uk/films/0/guns…

When new French Marine Commandos receive their green berets, the tradition isn't purely French. It was shaped in Scotland in 1942, when Philippe Kieffer's Free French volunteers trained at the British Commando centre at Achnacarry and were folded into the Inter-Allied Commando structure. From that period they took both the green beret itself and the distinctive "à l’anglaise" way of wearing it - tilted to the right, badge over the left eye - a small but deliberate reminder of the British instructors and methods that formed the unit. Léon Gautier, the last of the 177 men of Commando Kieffer who landed on Sword Beach, was a regular presence at these ceremonies in Ouistreham until his death in 2023, sometimes placing the beret himself. Watching the clip, you see the same setting and the same unbroken line: men who completed the hard selection their predecessors endured under British training, now marching through the town that still marks the start of the liberation. The style of the beret and the place itself keep that 1942 origin visible without needing much explanation. For all the centuries of Anglo-French rivalry - the endless mockery, the old jokes about the "sweetest enemy," the habit of needling each other at every opportunity - there has always been a quieter understanding between their soldiers. When the stakes are real, the banter drops away. The men who trained together at Achnacarry, landed side by side on Sword Beach, and still wear the same green beret in the same way know how to recognise genuine courage when they see it, regardless of the flag on the shoulder.

Clarke is right about the risk, but J.R.R. Tolkien shows the practical way out of it. Fairy stories work less by inventing wonder than by clearing the grime off ordinary things: once you've met the centaur and the dragon, the actual sheep, the trees, the hillside stop looking like inventory and start looking like themselves again. C.S. Lewis was more direct about the obstacle. When he dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield, he wrote that she was already growing up and might soon be too old for it -though he hoped she would one day be old enough to enjoy it again. The adult who still feels slightly silly reading the books he loved at ten has only traded one kind of immaturity for another; that quiet embarrassment is what keeps the landscape flattened into material we can use or leave. Stay with the stories and the places keep something of their own presence.

« J'ai l'amour de la raison, je n’en ai pas le fanatisme […] quand vous en aurez fait une divinité, elle vous aveuglera et vous persuadera des crimes. » - Anatole France, The Gods Are Thirsty (1912) "I love reason, but I do not have its fanaticism […] when you make it a divinity, it will blind you and persuade you to commit crimes." In The Gods Are Thirsty, Anatole France holds up the French Revolution's Reign of Terror as a cold mirror. Évariste Gamelin starts as an idealistic young painter who wants a better world. He ends up as a revolutionary judge sending people to the guillotine for not being pure enough. France shows how fast a hunger for justice can turn into a hunger for blood, and how the finest slogans can give ordinary people permission to do terrible things. The book isn't just about 1794. France had seen mob logic up close during the Dreyfus Affair. He knew that dogmatic certainty - even when it wears the clothes of reason or virtue - has a way of eating everything around it. Every age makes its own gods. And those gods are always thirsty. They're thirsty again in France. What started in September as student protests in the banlieues over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, broken buildings, and the mess of Parcoursup has grown into big nationwide marches about the cost of living, inequality, and crumbling public services. Plenty of the grievances are real. But the pattern Anatole France described is hard to miss. The same language of justice and equality that draws people into the streets keeps getting used to justify the ugliest stuff. Hooded far left militants and thuggish opportunists peel off from the main crowds and treat destruction itself as proof they're on the right side. Moderation starts looking like betrayal. Violence becomes the sincerity test. France never pretended the Revolution didn't begin with genuine complaints, or that liberty, equality, and fraternity were empty words. He just showed what happens when those ideas get turned into absolute gods that demand total purity. Once that happens, they stop lighting the way and start consuming the society they're supposed to save. Anatole France, the Dreyfusard who loved reason without worshipping it, would have recognised the scene. The warning isn't that protest is wrong. It's that the moment an ideal becomes absolute, it stops clarifying anything and starts feeding.

A good rule of thumb.

Hollywood went ahead and did it anyway.

« Pablo un des rares qui a du savoir-rire. » - Jacques Prévert on Picasso "Pablo, one of the rare ones who knows how to laugh." Jacques Prévert and Pablo Picasso became close friends in the years after the war, mostly around Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Antibes, and Cannes. Biographers of Prévert. Biographers like Yves Courrière and Carole Aurouet describe an easy, companionable bond built on shared humour and mutual respect, centred on the circle at La Colombe d’Or. They worked together on several projects. Prévert provided the story for the ballet Le Rendez-vous, for which Picasso painted the curtain. Prévert also wrote the text for the 1959 book Portraits de Picasso (photographs by André Villers) and contributed to Diurnes in 1962; and he included the playful poem "Promenade de Picasso" in Paroles. Picasso, in turn, dedicated books and drawings to him as "mon ami" or "mon cher ami" and painted a small scene of the Prévert family bathing that he inscribed "pour mon ami Jacques Prévert."

Great that your daughters loved it! The film is only a small slice of a much larger world. I'm hoping to ease my kids into the Patrick O'Brian books at the right time. The surest way to get kids interested is reverse psychology: put the book you want them to read on the highest shelf and sternly forbid it as “adults only.” Curiosity does the rest. Start at the beginning with Master and Commander (1969) and read in publication order - which is also the chronological order. There are 20 finished novels plus one unfinished; they form one long story of Jack "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The movie mainly draws from the 10th book (The Far Side of the World), mixed with bits from earlier ones, and changes the historical setting. Jumping straight to it means missing how the friendship and characters develop. Better to go in order - if the first one hooks you, you'll keep going. Enjoy!