Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!

A quick Google search assures me that the French use ‘être une bonne pâte’ (to be a good dough, more or less literally) as a vaguely colloquial equivalent of ‘a decent chap’ (or female equivalent, no doubt. But we know that I could spend hours of agonising over register and gender-neutrality, and actually I’m just […]

On war, Corbyn and other things. (An ode to the children of the early nineties.)

Listening to a podcast today on, of all things, the evolution of superhero films (don’t blame me, blame the French, who are capable of taking just about anything as a serious art form, and going into great detail about the psychoanalytical background to such texts), I was struck by a throwaway comment about how attitudes […]