Agnès Poirier

Matt Ridley, William Cook, Owen Matthews and Agnes Poirier

From our UK edition

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Matt Ridley argues that whoever you vote for, the blob wins (1:02); William Cook reads his Euros notebook from Germany (12:35); Owen Matthews reports on President Zelensky’s peace summit (16:21); and, reviewing Michael Peel’s new book ‘What everyone knows about Britain’, Agnes Poirier ponders if only Britain knew how it

If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad

From our UK edition

A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and

Baron of the boulevards

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Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera house, designed by Charles Garnier ‘in a style of unabashed grandeur’, with its gilded and mirrored salons, shimmering candelabra and marbled colonnades, mosaics, statues, frescoes and ‘flaming gas torches enhancing a central stairwell that turned

A deep malaise

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Here is a detail that says a lot. In the French translation of this latest book by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, the title was followed by a question mark. In the English translation there isn’t one. The author is making a statement, not asking a question. The French intellectual is dead, finished, a thing