An introduction to The Rights of Man and Fish by Paul Halas History is bunk, to quote Henry Ford – which, of course, ignores the wider context of what he said, but then he wanted to sell us motor cars and probably wasn’t all that interested in the truth of…
Category: France
1960s
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May Uprising, Paris, 1968
by Garry O’Connor ‘The past is bourgeois propaganda,’ booms a deep voice in French from the stage of Paris’s Odéon Theatre. I am participating after a fashion in the May uprising of 1968. I have lived for some months in a tiny maid’s room, eight flights up on the Île…
Food
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A bas le fast-food
French cuisine ain’t as good as it used to be. The rot set in well before Chirac made his famous remarks, and seems to be accelerating. As someone who has visited and stayed in France frequently over the decades, I chart this decline with great sadness. French cuisine has always been celebrated for its excellence and variety, and has been inextricably a big part of my seventy year bout of Francophilia.
Animation with a social conscience
Halas & Batchelor Cartoon Films 1940 – 1995 By Vivien Halas This year marks the 80th year since my parents, John Halas and Joy Batchelor founded Halas & Batchelor Cartoons, in its day a household name responsible for over 2000 animated films. Their best-known film Animal Farm (1954) was the…
Eve Hall
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From the forthcoming memoir: Eve and Tony
Extract originally published in The London Magazine By Eve Hall My heroine of very early days was Joan of Arc, whom I loved passionately. I dreamed of martyrdom and detested the English soldiers who burned her at the stake. Every Friday afternoon I used to wait for my mother outside…
Food
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How to be a Gourmet
– like Richard Steinhardt By Phil Hall Grandpa was an admirer of Napoleon and this was partly why he chose to live in Golfe Juan in 1972. The other reason they both chose to live in Golfe was because they had gone on honeymoon to Cannes and Nice in 1935. My grandfather, Richard Steinhardt, became a…
Communism
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Mon Oncle
By Paul Halas On my very infrequent visits to Paris, passing Drancy Station on the RER suburban line between Orly Airport and Paris is always a poignant experience. My Uncle Ladis – Ladislaw – spent some time there during World War Two.In 1966, as a seventeen year old, I had…
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