Paris

Saturday

Lara Prendergast

In their own words – the Paris attacks as told by the survivors

Last night, terrorists launched a total of six coordinated attacks at high-profile sites across Paris. French prosecutors have put the current death toll at 128, with 99 critically injured. There were two suicide bomb attacks at a bar near the Stade de France where President Hollande was watching the match. One witness told the Mail: He felt like he was ‘in a video game’. ‘There was an explosion in front of us. It was a very loud noise. At first I thought it was a bin that had been set alight. But then I thought it wasn’t a fire cracker. ‘Everyone stopped. A man was on the floor screaming. I don’t know what happened

Melanie McDonagh

The best way to show solidarity with Paris? Visit

Well, the nice thing is that Je Suis Parisienne is a bit more chic than Je Suis Charlie when it comes to Making a Stand slogans, though in my case there is the qualifier – if only. There’s something enormously poignant about mass murder in a city  where the arts of elegance are esteemed so highly. It makes the blood and terror and indignity so much more incongruous, though the city has, of course, seen revolution and terror before. We can of course waste our breath talking about the need to take the fight to the terrorists, and I’m all for that. (On the ill wind principle, this should make

John R. Bradley

The Islamic State says France is atop its target list – and declares a new war

Speaking from the Élysée Palace, Francois Hollande has said that the terror attacks which killed 127 in Paris last night were the work of the Islamic State. What happened yesterday in Paris and in Saint Denis is an act of war and this country needs to make the right decisions to fight this war. This act committed by the terrorist army, Islamic State, is against who we are, against a free country that speaks to the whole world. It is an act of war prepared and planned outside, with outside involvement which this investigation will seek to establish. It is an act of absolute barbarism. France will be ruthless in

Qanta Ahmed

Islam6

UPDATE: Watch Dr Ahmed discuss this article on CNN here  The appalling attacks in Paris last night were, as Francois Hollande said, an act of war. They were Islamism’s declaration of war on free society – but, crucially, they represented something else. An act of war, by Islamists, upon Islam itself. As Douglas Murray says, it is lazy and wrong to argue that these attacks had nothing to do with Islam. The repugnant creed of the Islamic State is certainly related to Islam – but it is also inimical to Islam. The scenes in Paris will shock Muslims world over; indeed, when we Muslims hear of gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” before committing the

Friday

Isabel Hardman

‘An attack on all of humanity’: politicians condemn Paris massacre

At least 40 people are reported dead in tonight’s attacks in Paris, with French forces trying to release hostages who are still being held. President Hollande has declared a national state of emergency and closed the country’s borders, saying ‘terrorist attacks of an unprecedented scale’ were taking place and that ‘it is a horror’. Politicians from around the world have condemned the attacks. President Obama gave a statement this evening, describing the shootings and explosion as ‘an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share’. He said the attacks were an ‘outrageous attempt to terrorise innocent civilians’ and that America stood ‘prepared and ready to provide whatever

Douglas Murray

The Paris attacks show that barbarians are inside the gate

A wave of terror attacks has rocked Paris tonight with a restaurant, a stadium and a concert hall amongst the targets. Gunmen fired into Bataclan concert hall shouting “Allahu akbar,” according to France24, and then proceeded to hold hostages; French police then went in hard and some reports have suggested that up to 100 may have been killed during the operation with 40 others killed across the city. Two suicide attacks have also been reported outside the Stade de France stadium, and explosions were heard while the France vs Germany football match was underway:- A state of emergency has just been declared in France, the first since the 2005 Paris riots; curfew has been declared

Thursday

The Spectator

Hot air summit

The delegates who will gather for the star-studded Paris climate summit include celebrities, presidents and perhaps even the Pope. Among other things, they will be asked to consider the formation of an ‘International Tribunal of Climate Justice’, which developed countries would be hauled before for breaching agreed limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That the proposed body will seek to be ‘non-punitive, non-adversarial and non-judicial’ does not reassure. A tribunal, if it is worthy of the name, ought to be all those things. Does the threat of climate change really justify such a system? It is disturbing to think how many world leaders and policymakers might casually answer ‘yes’. Barack Obama,

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Love, loneliness and all that jazz

Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society, moralistic nihilist and icon of nebbishes everywhere, will be 80 on 1 December. He says he hopes to sleep through the occasion, but he is already completing next year’s film, his 47th, and preparing a series of programmes for television. In the meantime, here, in homage, are two magnificently illustrated catalogues raisonnés. Both books incidentally tell the story of his life, including the time when he courted his former partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and caused all media hell to break loose. He survived disapproval by working, married

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 9 July 2015

The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to be an exciting decade. I had got married, found a job, had two babies and was leading the stressful life of a young family man, quite unaware that all around me Britain was bubbling with excitement. In 1966 I was in Paris, doing night shifts as a trainee journalist for Reuters news agency, when I happened upon a cover of Time magazine, emblazoned with girls in miniskirts and boys in flared trousers, announcing that London was ‘the swinging city’. When I came home to check this out, London seemed much

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 2 July 2015

The Eurostar train descended gently into the Channel Tunnel, went halfway along it, and then stopped. There it remained for what seemed a very long time, the silence broken only occasionally by mumbled announcements in French and English. The speaker was French, and his English was incomprehensible, his French only slightly less so. All that we could gather was that the train was being delayed by some sort of trouble in Calais. Only much later did we learn that migrants from a refugee camp had been swarming on to lorries heading for England and generally creating mayhem. They had even lit a fire on the railway track. Eventually it was

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A cemetery with cocktails: La Coupole and the spirit of the brasserie

La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have an Esprit Brasserie loyalty card, as I have, you can dine in homage to dead continental intellectuals — plus Ernest Hemingway — whenever you wish, and with 20 per cent off. They sit, dead in black and white on the walls in their spectacles, like the toys Star Wars sold but more rigorous and interesting. Ernest Hemingway is to Parisian brasseries what Mickey is to Disney World; Edith Piaf — or Salvador Dalí — is Daffy Duck. Me, I sat under a playful cartoon of Jewish intellectuals murdered by the

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My afternoon in a Gallic version of Betfred

For the Cheltenham Festival I received the customary tipster circular from my pal Soapy Joe. Soapy’s most convincing credential as a horse-racing tipster is that he is banned from every high street bookmaker in the land because he takes too much money off the poor souls. I slept with him once. I woke up in an upstairs bedroom of a Gloucestershire stately home on the second morning of our week-long Cheltenham Festival house party, pieced together where I was, and why, and saw, sitting up in the next bed, Soapy in his stripy pyjamas listening to the commentary of a horse race in Dubai or somewhere on a pocket radio.

Thursday

Harry Mount

Seeing Paris through Impressionist eyes

The spectre of the Charlie Hebdo killings still hangs over Paris. Outside the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, opposite the Louvre, there’s a big poster of Cabu, one of the murdered cartoonists. The poster is peppered with fake bullet holes; underneath, the caption reads, ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’ I didn’t realise, until I talked to the curator of the new Impressionist show at the National Gallery in London, that Cabu was a popular figure on French children’s TV in the 1970s. His death particularly haunts the middle-aged, who grew up on his cartoons. The Charlie Hebdo posters across Paris still bring you up short. I hope it isn’t sacrilege

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 5 March 2015

Home The man seen in several Islamic State videos of hostages being beheaded, nicknamed Jihadi John by the British press, was revealed as Mohammed Emwazi, aged 26, born in Kuwait but raised from the age of six in London. He was said to have had help with anger management at his secondary school, Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood. An advocacy group called Cage produced a recording of him complaining that MI5 had questioned him after he had to turn back from a ‘safari’ in Tanzania in 2009. General Raymond Odierno, the chief of staff of the US army, said he was ‘very concerned’ about British defence cuts. Lance

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

The dark comedy of the Senate torture report

Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports, it sometimes brings out in me the opposite of sincere curiosity so essential to my trade. Thus when my French publisher asked me to write a preface to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s report on the CIA’s torture programme, and come to Paris to promote a translated edition, I was reluctant. Hadn’t I already read everything about this? As much as I detest the CIA and love Paris, a book tour to discuss waterboarding and forced rectal feeding struck me as less than appealing. Nevertheless, civic duty spurred me and a lawyer

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)

Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual premise to a tightly controlled and claustrophobic thriller. Its only drawback was that it was a hard act to follow. Novelists tend to dump all their brilliant ideas into their first book, and the white heat of originality compensates to some extent for any want of craft. Second novels lack both advantages, and have the additional problem that readers come to them laden with expectations. Like its predecessor, Second Life is a slice of domestic noir with a woman narrator. It is set mainly in affluent corners of London, with

Saturday

Douglas Murray

I don’t want to live under Islamic blasphemy law. That doesn’t make me racist

I have spent most of the last fortnight debating Islam and blasphemy and wanted to take the opportunity to put down a few unwritten thoughts. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris atrocities most of the people who thought the journalists and cartoonists in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ kept their heads down.  I encountered a few who did not, including Asghar Bukhari from the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee).  In the aftermath of the atrocity Asghar was immediately eager to smear the cartoonists and editors of Charlie Hebdo as racists.  From what he and others of his ilk have been sending around since, they appear to have

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

French secularism is starting to feel the strain

France is to institute something called a National Secularity Day, which will happen on 9th December every year, when French schools will remind pupils how to sing the national anthem, what the tricolor stands for and generally celebrate the values of the Republic. Odd, isn’t it, that this should sound so much like the reflexive, everyday practice in the United States, where flag veneration and the separation of church and state are hardwired into the consciousness of US children, without impinging at all on the extent of religious observance? Every French school will have to go through this Secularism observance day but it’s painfully apparent which community it’s directed at:

Friday

Douglas Murray

Do Theresa May and Mr Henry Bellingham think we were born yesterday?

On Wednesday the Home Secretary made a statement in the House of Commons about the terrorist attacks last week in Paris. Here is part of the Hansard transcript of the resulting debate: Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con): Is the Home Secretary aware that when the Prophet Mohammed moved from Mecca to Medina all those years ago to establish the first Islamic state, he did not set up a sectarian caliphate, such as that demanded by the Paris murderers, but rather, under the charter of Medina, he created a multi-faith society, where Jews and Christians had the right to worship and were able to proclaim their faiths? Mrs May: