Mobilise the Old Guard. They're sending in their historians now.

Norm Macdonald's style stood apart because he treated stand-up comedy like conversation rather than performance. He slurred words, repeated himself, and stretched setups far past the point of comfort, then landed a punchline so plain or absurd that the delay itself became the laugh. He trusted the audience to stay with him instead of chasing instant payoff. Norm had that rare combination of total originality and genuine surprise that made even a moth joke or a string of corny dad jokes feel like nothing else on stage. He just told the joke he wanted to tell and waited to see who was still listening. The absence of that unhurried, unapologetic strangeness is why his comedy is in a league of its own.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. - Ernest Hemingway Keeping it simple.

Hitchens is right. This 3 hour French epic refuses the usual hagiography. It shows Churchill - immense as a war leader - as a flawed, irascible politician locked in a stormy partnership with de Gaulle. It's a rare cinematic treat that makes the later nuclear divergence of these two titanic nations visible on screen, and Britain would be poorer for ignoring it. @ClarkeMicah is also right about the lessons that Britain can learn from the film. The contrast he draws is not a journalistic flourish; it's the central strategic fact of the post-Suez nuclear age. After 1956 both Britain and France discovered that American goodwill had limits. De Gaulle drew the logical conclusion and built a complete national arsenal -warheads, missiles, boats - outside NATO's nuclear planning and beyond any foreign veto. France thereby purchased the one commodity no alliance can reliably supply: the certainty that the decision to use, or not to use, nuclear force would remain French. Britain chose differently. Churchill had insisted on an independent bomb after the McMahon Act slammed the door in 1946; Attlee delivered it; Macmillan then mortgaged the delivery system to Washington in the Nassau Agreement of 1962. Polaris and later Trident missiles came from an American pool, were maintained in Georgia, and required continuous American industrial support. The warheads remained British and the Prime Minister alone could authorise launch, yet the architecture of the deterrent was now inseparable from the special relationship. Subsequent governments accepted the bargain as cheaper and technically superior. They also accepted its unspoken premise that British nuclear sovereignty would thereafter be exercised inside an American-designed system. That's the crucial distinction Hitchens isolates, and it's historically exact. France kept the keys. Britain rented the lock. In the end France won that argument. dailymail.com/news/article-1…

It's said Goethe fell hard for Shakespeare when he was still young and never quite got over it: "The first page I read made me a slave to Shakespeare for life." The same man who treated the Bard like a kind of secular Prometheus could turn rather waspish about the living English. He granted they were born orators and practical men, eyes always on the facts, forever turning one discovery into the next. All the same, he muttered that they remained pedants who wouldn't look past their blinkers, and that they had "no aesthetic-moral judgement; they speak only of individual beauties." While the Germans wore themselves out untying philosophical knots, the English simply laughed with their great practical understanding and went right ahead and pocketed the world. That was the verdict of a man who had spent half a century on their language and literature, and who rather liked to boast that if he ever set foot in England he would be no stranger there.

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them. - Sir Winston S. Churchill Winston Churchill's relationship with alcohol was as unorthodox as the man himself. He simply seemed to have a glass somewhere near him from morning until the small hours. He began many mornings in bed with a weak "Papa Cocktail" of Johnnie Walker barely staining a tumbler of water, progressed to an imperial pint of champagne at luncheon, and closed the evening with brandy. He liked to say he had taken more out of alcohol than it had taken out of him, and for once the boast held up. In 1913 he even put it on a life-assurance form with perfect deadpan: "Whisky and champagne at meals - nothing between." The stories piled up anyway. After he lost the 1945 election he decamped to Lake Como with his daughter Sarah and his doctor. Between them they went through 96 bottles of champagne in a fortnight. And there was the famous collision with Labour MP Bessie Braddock outside the Commons. She told him he was disgustingly drunk. He told her she was disgustingly ugly, and added that tomorrow he would be sober and she would still be ugly. His bodyguard, Ronald Golding, was standing right there and swore it happened. The champagne itself had been a long affair. As early as 1908, when he was President of the Board of Trade, he was already ordering Pol Roger - the 1895 vintage, a dozen bottles and half-bottles from his St James's merchant. It took the Second World War for the friendship to become personal in November 1944. Paris had just been liberated. Churchill laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, then went to dinner at the British Embassy. Duff Cooper and Lady Diana sat him next to the elegant Odette Pol-Roger. The 1928 was poured. He was instantly taken - with her, with the wine, with the whole glittering idea of France still standing. After that he gave instructions that she was to be invited whenever he returned to Paris. She sent him a case of the 1928 every birthday until it ran out. Churchill was touched enough to name a racehorse Pol Roger and he called Odette's home on the Avenue de Champagne "the world’s most drinkable address." Churchill kept the same liturgy almost to the last. Into his late 80s the weak whisky still stood at his elbow through the morning papers, the pint of Pol Roger still arrived with luncheon, and the brandy still accompanied the late hours of dictation and conversation. Visitors to Chartwell and Hyde Park Gate in the early 1960s found the ritual undiminished. When he died in January 1965, at 90, Odette Pol-Roger ordered a black border placed around every bottle destined for the British market - a discreet mourning band that remained for years. It was a fitting coda. The man who had once told insurers that whisky and champagne were merely "habits" had carried those habits through two world wars, the wilderness years, and the long twilight, and had outlived most of the abstemious. The old man who once listed drink as a mere “habit” had carried the habit through wars, wilderness and a very long twilight had simply outlived most of the abstemious. In the end the bottle didn't conquer him; he simply put it down when there was nothing left to toast.

« Naufragé de la désolation sur les rivages de l’Angleterre, qu’aurais-je pu faire sans son concours ? » - Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre "A castaway of desolation on the shores of England, what could I have done without his help?" When France collapsed in June 1940, Charles de Gaulle reached London with his aide Geoffroy de Courcel and an envelope of 100,000 francs from Paul Reynaud's secret funds. The Free French treasury opened with fourteen shillings and the sterling equivalent of that envelope. Churchill recognised him at once and offered to pay for the movement. De Gaulle refused a gift. He would not have his volunteers look like British mercenaries. On the night of 7 August they signed the agreement at Downing Street. British outlays for arms, uniforms, offices and pay would be advances, separately ledged, to be settled later. Churchill added a sentence de Gaulle prized: His Majesty’s Government was resolved, after victory, to restore the independence and greatness of France. The Treasury kept the books with peacetime exactitude. The picture of billing every railway ticket is rhetorical; the principle was not. De Gaulle preferred it that way. Sovereignty was the point. Equatorial Africa and Cameroon rallied. Taxes and the gold of Congo prospectors began to flow. De Gaulle undertook to sell at least half that gold to the Bank of England. A Caisse Centrale was set up in London in 1941. By late 1943 the Committee of National Liberation in Algiers had enough. The British closed the accounts on 31 July. René Pleven - the businessman-turned-commissioner who had organised Free French finances from the first months in London and later became minister of finance - repaid the advances before the war in Europe ended. Pierre Mendès-France, the austere Radical economist who had escaped Vichy, flown with the Free French air force and then taken the finance portfolio in Algiers, told the Consultative Assembly that the sum did not even equal the cost of an exhibition. Others likened it to the price of a battlecruiser. A wider Anglo-French financial agreement in 1945 tidied other wartime claims. The Free French debt itself was already gone. When de Gaulle returned to Paris, France did not owe Britain for its own resurrection.

John Wilkes made his name by treating the constitution as a blood sport. In The North Briton No. 45 he called the king's speech a lie, was arrested on a general warrant, and then spent the next decade turning expulsion, exile and riot into a doctrine: that Parliament could not unseat a man the voters kept sending back. The courts struck down those warrants; the Commons lost its power to punish the reporting of its own debates; "Wilkes and Liberty" became the shout that made press freedom feel like a street fight rather than a pamphlet. The wit was the delivery system, and he often turned it on himself. He was, by any decent standard, a frightful-looking man - squint, protruding jaw, the works - and he knew it. That was part of the joke. He used to boast that it took him half an hour to talk his face away, and that even with a month’s head start a handsome rival still wouldn't beat him to a woman's bed. The same cheerfully lethal tongue did the political work. When a voter announced he would rather vote for the Devil, Wilkes smiled and said, "Naturally. And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?" Invited to cards while at war with the king's ministers, he declined on the grounds that he could not tell a king from a knave. An ally who snapped that he would no longer be Wilkes' butt was told, "With all my heart. I never like an empty one." So it is not surprising that the witty riposte to John Montagu later stuck to Wilkes. It was not his. The earliest versions give it to Samuel Foote - the Haymarket mimic and playwright who made a living roasting the living at dinner and on stage - answering John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, and the man whose title became a snack because he supposedly would not leave the gaming table. It clung to Wilkes anyway, because it sounded exactly like him: a man who turned every insult into an exhibit of his opponent’s hypocrisy. That, more than the scandals, is why he remains the guilty pleasure of 18th-century British politics.

All roads really do lead to Rome.

"I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity. …Why do the stupid people always win, and the clever people always lose? I need not say that, in real sound stupidity, the English are unrivalled. You'll hear more wit, and better wit, in an Irish street row than would keep Westminster Hall in humour for five weeks. …A Frenchman - a real Frenchman - can't be stupid; esprit is his essence, wit is to him as water, bons-mots as bonbons. …I … maintain that nations, just as individuals, may be too clever to be practical, and not dull enough to be free." - Walter Bagehot, "Letter on the French Coup d'État," The Inquirer, 24 Jan 1852. Walter Bagehot's 1852 letter is a sly defence of English phlegm. He argued that the French gift for brilliance, system-building and verbal fireworks left them perpetually vulnerable to the next glittering idea or charismatic adventurer, while the English talent for dull, unimaginative common sense - what he provocatively called "stupidity" - kept them from being swept off their feet. In his view, nations too clever for their own good invent constitutions they cannot live with; nations dull enough to distrust theory simply muddle through and remain free. It is the most elegant compliment ever paid to British denseness.

Why don't you come sober, Prime Minister? - Nancy Astor when Winston Churchill asked what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball. The relationship between Nancy Astor and Winston Churchill was never merely a drawing-room spat. Historians have long seen it as mutual irritation sharpened by real political difference. Churchill, who had opposed women's suffrage and still regarded the Commons as a man's club, greeted Britain's first sitting female MP with a famously ungracious image: her arrival, he told her, felt as if she had walked into his bathroom while he had only a sponge with which to defend himself. Astor, a teetotal Virginian of formidable self-assurance, never forgot the slight and repaid it in kind. Their clashes over drink, gender and, later, appeasement supplied the raw material for a series of half-authenticated sallies. The masquerade ball exchange was typical of their mutual antipathy. Whether she actually said it or not, the line captures the flavour of their repartée - her Puritan disdain for his well-known fondness for champagne meeting his unapologetic gusto. Other barbs have attached themselves to the pair with equal persistence, even when the evidence is thinner. The most famous has Astor snapping, "Winston, you are horribly drunk," only for Churchill to reply that she was ugly, but that at least he would be sober in the morning. Historians generally give that exchange to the Labour MP Bessie Braddock in 1946 rather than to Astor; the version with Nancy is almost certainly a later transplant. The poison-in-the-tea story is equally well-travelled and equally shaky: Astor threatens to dose his cup if she were his wife; he answers that if he were her husband he would drink it. The joke itself predates both of them by decades. What remains is less a catalogue of authenticated put-downs than a shared reputation for verbal combat - two formidable egos who found in each other a convenient and highly entertaining target. Still, the underlying antagonism was genuine enough. In the 1930s she belonged to the Cliveden circle that favoured accommodation with Hitler; he stood almost alone in warning of the coming storm. Wit, in their case, was simply the socially acceptable form of a deeper hostility.

Unlike Churchill, Charles de Gaulle wasn't a big drinker. At La Boisserie, his modest country house in the Haute-Marne, de Gaulle liked the Extra Dry champagne from Drappier, a small family house just down the road in Urville that his aide-de-camp had put him on to. He drank it from an old-fashioned coupe, usually with dessert, and poured it for family and a few close friends rather than at the official banquets of the Élysée. He did like wine too. From his study window he could see the Aube vines. He enjoyed a sturdy, Pinot-heavy wine from a neighbour that fitted both his liking for the real thing and his wish to keep Colombey separate from the show of power. He drank little, but he drank well.

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective. - Gustave Flaubert Flaubert treated language the way a goldsmith treats metal: he would not let a sentence leave the forge until every word had been beaten into its only possible shape. For him le mot juste was not a nicety but a moral duty. Friends remembered him pacing the garden at Croisset, reciting a phrase aloud for hours, testing its weight and music, then crossing it out and beginning again. A single paragraph of Madame Bovary could cost him a week. He once compared himself to a violinist whose ear is perfect while his fingers refuse to find the note. The result, of course, is prose that seems inevitable - as if the words had always been waiting there, and Flaubert had merely the patience, and the torment, to uncover them. In many ways he was a martyr to his craft.

Ah, the after taste of metaphysical despair. At least Hegel's version sold better. His just said "the Absolute is unfolding as planned."

His grandfather was just as immense. General Alexandre Dumas was the sort of man who makes fiction look timid. He had an incredible and improbable life. Born enslaved in Saint-Domingue to a French marquis and a Black woman named Marie-Cessette, he crossed the Atlantic, enlisted as a private, and within seven years commanded the Army of the Alps, becoming the first man of African descent to hold such rank in a European army. Austrians called him the Black Devil after he held a narrow Tyrolean bridge alone against a cavalry squadron, cutting them down until reinforcements arrived; Napoleon, grudgingly, likened him to Horatius at the gate. Towering, immensely strong, and almost recklessly brave, he fought for the Revolution's ideals more than any emperor’s glory, then died young and nearly forgotten - leaving his son the novelist a life so extraordinary it needed only a little polish to become legend (Porthos in The Three Musketeers is said to be a homage to him by his son).

The sermon, given in October 2025 before the elite 3e RPIMa regiment at Carcassonne Cathedral on the feast of their patron St Michael, was filmed and released almost a year later by the satirical and politically provocative publication, Le Canard Enchaîné. It at once became a political quarrel. Critics on the left denounced it as racist or even seditious; others heard only the familiar language of an elite parachute regiment that values courage, conviction and the nation's historic identity. The chaplain's opening remark that they were "en famille" and that no one was recording suggests he knew he was treading on delicate ground. Chaplains have always been expected to stiffen morale and recall the claims of duty, sacrifice and France's Christian past, particularly among the paras. To name a political camp and adopt the slogans of the hustings during Mass is another matter. It sits uneasily with the military duty of reserve, which is why this homily caused a scandal rather than passing as ordinary pastoral speech.

Celebrate when you're half done, And the finish won't be half as fun. - Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

In the late 1980s I took a semester-long undergraduate seminar on terrorism and diplomacy at Georgetown, taught by the director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service. It soon became clear that not one of the students could tell an Arab from a Persian. Bear in mind these were the elite: smart kids raised abroad as diplomat or military brats, the sort who would later walk into State or Langley. I remember the director putting his face in his hands and quietly weeping as he muttered, "No wonder we lost Iran in 1979."