John Milton is often credited with introducing more words into English than Shakespeare, at least going by some tallies of the earliest recorded uses done by Cambridge scholar Gavin Alexander. By Alexander’s count, Milton is responsible for about 630 words, which puts him ahead of Ben Jonson (558), John Donne (342), and Shakespeare himself (229). Without him the language would lack liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic, and love-lorn, among many others. Milton's coinages fall into a handful of loose categories. Sometimes he gave an existing word a new sense, as when he used space to mean outer space. Sometimes he formed a new part of speech from an old one, turning a verb into a noun or an adjective into a verb, producing words such as stunning and literalism. He was especially fond of negatives; unprincipled, unaccountable, and irresponsible are his, and more than a hundred of his entries begin with un-. He also made compounds (arch-fiend, self-delusion) and, occasionally, invented words from scratch. Pandemonium is the clearest of these pure inventions: he coined it as the name for the capital of Hell, literally "all demons," and only later did it settle into its modern sense of chaotic uproar. Sensuous is another he is credited with; he wanted a way to speak of something pleasing to the senses that did not automatically carry the sexual charge of sensual. Then there is complacency (which he spelled complacencie). For Milton it meant a kind of mutual satisfaction or quiet contentment; only afterward did the word drift toward the uncritical self-satisfaction we usually hear in it now. Without Milton's coinages, English would settle into a complacency that treats its existing stock as sufficient, leaving us dismissively unprincipled about the need for new forms and content to padlock our speech inside didactic formulas and liturgical repetitions, so that any terrific attempt at embellishing the language to name fresh disorder collapses into pandemonium, the fragrance of invention lost on those left love-lorn and unhealthily besotted with the old, while the sensuous possibilities of expression remain unexplored amid self-delusion. time.com/82601/the-origins-o…

We have 1,000 British troops defending Estonia and I for one am delighted if it helps protect this

Invoking Gaza to excuse violence, romanticise chaos and justify antisemitism isn’t solidarity. It’s moral hypocrisy. And it only strengthens the far right. By the great @SophiaAram

Five years later, the Flying Pig's closure still feels like a real loss for Cambridge. It was never just another pub. The candlelit rooms, the walls covered in posters, the real ale, and that small stage turned it into a proper home for the city's live music, the kind of place that put on regular, unfussy gigs and drew people in from well outside Cambridge. It also carried the old story of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and David Gilmour first meeting there. Cambridge has always been lucky with pubs that quietly hold onto this sort of layered local history. The White Horse Inn was where students and scholars in the 1520s once gathered to read and argue over Martin Luther's smuggled writings, earning it the nickname Little Germany in the early days of the Reformation. The Eagle pub is still marked by the moment Crick and Watson announced they had found the structure of DNA, and by the ceiling of the RAF Bar where men from the US 8th Air Force and the RAF burned their names and squadron numbers during the war. These are places where everyday stories and chance encounters matter as much as any famous association. Redevelopment can be necessary and can look impressive, but it needs to be careful with this kind of living character, the sort that isn't always aimed at tourists but still shapes how a city feels to the people who actually use it. Spots with that particular combination of history, atmosphere, and the chance encounters they encourage are almost impossible to invent again, and the Pig's silence is a reminder of how easily they disappear when the ordinary and the particular get treated as secondary.

This is a great post from @b_judah. Ben's instinct to park the Commonwealth as a largely ceremonial, Palace-led affair, dial back Britain's political investment, and build something tighter around CANZUK leaders plus a practical investment summit with India makes a lot of sense. It is a clear-eyed and pragmatic response to the drift into poorly attended, reparations-dominated gatherings, and I hope it starts a serious debate. My own concern is how quickly the space Britain would vacate is already being filled by others. Chinese capital has moved into the Caribbean in ways that are hard to ignore. By 2023 direct investment in the island countries had reached $3.3 billion, with infrastructure contracts running to $32.2 billion. Trade between China and the Caribbean grew from roughly $1 billion in 2002 to $8 billion by 2019, and at least ten Caribbean states have signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative since 2022. Across the wider Commonwealth, Beijing holds significant bilateral debt in 31 of the 56 members; between 2000 and 2023 it extended 1,306 loans worth $182 billion to African countries alone. Against that backdrop, a sharp reduction in British funding and ministerial attention does not create a vacuum so much as accelerate a shift already under way. The CANZUK alternative has its own constraints. The four countries together number about 137–140 million people and generate a combined nominal GDP in the region of $8.3–8.8 trillion. Recent bilateral trade is real -UK–Canada goods and services at £31.1 billion, UK–Australia at £23.2 billion - but before Brexit the three partners accounted for only around 3.5% of UK trade against 47% for the EU. A CANZUK-plus-India platform may still struggle for consistent high-level buy-in amid divergent economic priorities and geography. The distances involve multiple time zones and hemispheres, and each member already has stronger regional pulls: Canada toward the United States, the UK toward Europe, Australia and New Zealand toward Asia. Overlapping arrangements such as the CPTPP add further friction. A new summit can complement these ties, but it's less clear it can substitute for the residual networks the Commonwealth still provides. Perhaps it's too cynical to say, but even a carefully designed investment summit under the Commonwealth brand would still have to navigate demands for what is now routinely called "reparations in kind." Secretary-General Shirley Botchwey has described these as potentially including concessional financing, the return of artefacts, and climate measures. CARICOM's Ten-Point Plan similarly encompasses debt cancellation, health, education and related transfers. Developing Commonwealth members face climate financing needs running into the hundreds of billions annually; the Secretariat itself has so far facilitated only about $645 million. An open platform focused on investment is liable to be pressed to absorb some of these claims, recreating in a different register the agenda-capture problem the current CHOGM format has already demonstrated. None of this is an argument against the direction Ben is pointing. The present CHOGM format has already turned into a net liability for British relationships, and pretending it can still serve as the main vehicle for post-imperial engagement just digs the hole deeper. Moving toward a tighter CANZUK-plus-India investment platform, with the Crown handling the residual cultural work, remains the cleaner and more realistic option - so long as London is clear-eyed about the influence contests and agenda pressures that will not simply disappear with the old summit. The alternative is not a revived Commonwealth, it's the slow, expensive continuation of something that has already stopped working.

« Moi je continue de penser que la vie est plus intéressante que le cinéma même quand elle m’emmerde. » - Catherine Deneuve "I still think life is more interesting than cinema, even when it annoys me." Like only siblings can. Catherine Deneuve and her older sister Françoise Dorléac were only 18 months apart, and they were close in that intense, sometimes volatile way sisters can be - almost too close, as Catherine later put it. They argued and even fought a good deal growing up, each describing the other as a kind of complementary opposite: Françoise the energetic, outgoing one, Catherine quieter and more inward. Françoise, already making her way in films, essentially pulled her younger sister into the business. They appeared together early on in Les Portes claquent, then most memorably in Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), playing twin sisters whose easy on-screen rapport still feels effortless. Françoise's death at 25 years old, in a car crash only 3 months after the film came out, left a permanent mark. Catherine stayed largely silent about it for years before eventually writing about her in book Elle s'appelait Françoise (with Patrick Modiano). Their brief shared moment on screen remains tied to Demy's bright, bittersweet musicals and to the lasting image of the two Dorléac sisters, while Catherine went on, alone, to become one of the defining figures of French cinema.

As Gen-Xer I was a tad too young to really appreciate this except as background music. But I'll take this any day of the week to anything now.

Maybe our selective concern for victims reveals that it's not really about the victims, but about showing that our enemies—or simply others—are worse scapegoaters than us. As Girard says, “The fashion [today] is one of weighing victims.” “Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” ~ René Girard (courtesy @chaven)

I made a video about what's going on in #France. On the subjects of who's protesting what, and why. Is this really about Islamism? Plus probably more French history content that I should have included, but once I get going... piped.video/_AlOaHu8X-s

The crowd at Paris Gare de Lyon came for a street performance. World famous pianist Lang Lang turned it into a live demonstration of why some people get standing ovations for a living.

« J'ai toujours pensé que Les Parapluies de Cherbourg était comme les contes de fées, à la fois très poétique et cruel. […] Je n'avais pas vingt ans, c'était juste pour moi une grande expérience. » - Catherine Deneuve Joyeux anniversaire ! 83 years old today. Catherine Deneuve has always felt like the face of French cinema in a way that goes beyond any official stamp - though she did briefly serve as the model for Marianne back in the '80s. What really sticks with people is the range of the roles she's taken on over the decades. In Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg she was the young, heartbreaking Geneviève whose love story unfolds entirely in song. A few years later in Polanski’s Repulsion she played a woman unravelling into psychosis, barely speaking as the walls close in. Buñuel's Belle de Jour gave her the part that still defines her for a lot of viewers - the cool, unreadable bourgeois wife who spends her afternoons in a brothel - while Truffaut's The Last Metro let her be steely and resourceful as an actress keeping a theatre alive under the Occupation. She and her older sister Françoise Dorléac later co-starred in Demy's colorful follow-up The Young Girls of Rochefort, playing twin sisters who dream of love and the big city. Dorléac’s death in a car crash in 1967, when she was only 25, cut that partnership short. It left a quiet mark on the family and on the Demy films that had brought them together. She's bounced between those kinds of intense, contained performances and lighter or more unexpected ones, from Demy's fairy-tale Donkey Skin to the campy ensemble of 8 Women or the Oscar-nominated colonial drama Indochine. When people have asked which film she feels closest to, she's consistently pointed back to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - the film that launched her career. She was barely twenty when she made it, and she's said it still feels like something special - a modern opera that shaped her early on and that she continues to regard as one of her most important experiences.

I showed this top-ten list of modern gauchistes to my French wife's godmother the other day. We're definitely opposite sides of the political fence but we get on great - it helps not too take oneself so seriously. She's an artist in her early eighties who grew up in a rural château in central France from a deeply Catholic family. Like many of her generation, she rebelled. Back in '68 she was right in the thick of the May riots and designed a lot of the famous protest posters - so famous, in fact, that the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts threw her out for it. These days she remains a true believer of sorts, but she has almost no patience for the current generation of leftists; she's openly contemptuous of them - many of them displayed here on this list. Quite the arc.

The opening of doors is a mystic act: it has in it some flavour of the unknown, some sense of moving into a new moment, a new pattern of the human rigmarole. It includes the highest glimpses of mortal gladness: reunions, reconciliations, the bliss of lovers long parted. Even in sadness, the opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human forces. But the closing of doors is far more terrible. It is a confession of finality. Every door closed brings something to an end. And there are degrees of sadness in the closing of doors. A door slammed is a confession of weakness. A door gently shut is often the most tragic gesture in life. Every one knows the seizure of anguish that comes just after the closing of a door, when the loved one is still near, within sound of voice, and yet already far away. -Christopher Morley, On Doors (1919)

This is what happens when you abandon the faith. Official ‘Irishness’ is now just globalised liberalism. The real thing survives better in the north…

Of all the things that have been hardest to communicate in my life, this seems the most impossible: that our civilisation is not, by some law of nature, immortal. It has no right or likelihood to continue existing if it insists on committing harakiri. The people who are welcomed onto our airwaves, work in parts of our government and lead some of our political parties include those who would burn down this country in a heart-beat. They would look us in the eyes and kill us. And we know that because they have done it elsewhere. They don't do it at the moment because the time is not right. But when they feel it is, they will act. At which point I suppose people will have to decide whether they wish to be spectators at their own funeral pyre or not. ✍️ Douglas Murray Article | spectator.com/article/france… | @DouglasKMurray

木枯らし Kogarashi (n.) A Japanese diplomat friend taught me this word when I asked him what he missed about Kyoto. We were sipping tea in an air-conditioned café in Abu Dhabi, where it was above 36°C. Kogarashi is the first cold wind of autumn that tells you winter is fast approaching - the leaf-shaking (or tree-withering) wind that strips the last leaves from the trees. Depending on how you feel about winter, its arrival is either exciting or foreboding.

“My field is not just dying; it’s dead.” —Yale historian Carlos Eire

Calling Jane Austen "prolific" because she wrote six novels is like calling a sniper "trigger-happy."

"The most triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid that of the hero in the hour of victory: and if the chariot and horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson’s translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory. He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and an example which are at this hour inspiring thousands of the youth of England: a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength." - Robert Southey, Life of Nelson (1813) Nelson stands as a hero in the English imagination because at Trafalgar he turned a real threat of invasion into a decisive defeat of the Franco-Spanish fleet, securing command of the seas for generations and doing so with a style of leadership that trusted his captains and led from the exposed deck of Victory. The signal he flew that morning ("England expects that every man will do his duty"), the earlier losses of an arm and an eye, and the manner of his death on the quarterdeck of Victory - still conscious long enough to hear the outcome - made the victory feel like a personal offering rather than simply a tactical success. That same morning he had written the prayer committing his life, asking for a victory that would benefit Britain and Europe, and hoping that humanity would mark the British fleet once the fighting ended. We speak less of this example today partly because the absolute character of that conviction sits uneasily with later cultural preferences. Nelson's certainty about country, cause, and the legitimacy of decisive action, combined with his total personal sacrifice, offers little room for the irony, ambivalence, or relativism that many contemporary historical treatments prefer. His private opposition to the abolition of the slave trade, the very public affair with Emma Hamilton, and the later association of the battle with the high point of British power have all supplied reasons for restraint. I think though that the deeper discomfort seems to lie in the unflinching character itself: an instance of duty pursued without reserve sits uneasily in a climate more at ease with doubt than with the kind of certainty that can cost a man his life.

On the morning of the battle of Trafalgar, 21 Oct 1805, Admiral Nelson made an entry into his journal that became known as his 'Trafalgar prayer'.