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  Is there anything more French than the guillotine, you may well ask? As a true crime writer resident in France, I’ve written about this head-chopping apparatus, first put to work in 1792 and last put to work in 1981, four years after capital punishment had been abolished by a parliamentary vote (1977). One of […]

Money makes the world go round, it is said. Money also turns people into murderers: those not having it, wanting it. And murdering to have it. This case  – the fatal shooting of Monaco billionaires, Hélène Pastor, on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 – is such a case. I reported the shooting in detail and I […]

  In July this year of 2018 France’s prison population was 70,710.   This number is out of France’s population which comes to 65,286,555 of whom about 6 million are foreign-born. Not bad, would you say? The French are behaving themselves. Not if you consider that France ‘s prisons can accommodate just 60,000. Therefore, France’s prisons […]

For the first half of this year of 2018 17,1 million tourists have come to Paris and the Ile de France (Paris region). Paris, since the end of WW2, having, each year, received more visitors than any other city in the world, has never ever had such a tourist boom. Tell it to us who […]

  August 1997 the world media, especially the British nationals, had just one lead story.  Tabloids like the Daily Mail, Mirror and The People, even broadsheets like The Times, kept calling their correspondents for updates: the editors did not want to miss anything. The story was: Princess Diana, divorced from Prince Charles heir to the […]

To stand facing one of these on a Paris street calls for that famous French  cry ‘oh là là!’ It is Paris’s newest public urinal for men. Known in French as an uritrottoirs – uri for urine and trottoirs for pavement (sidewalk) – four of them were placed in tourist spots in the French capital […]

  Today – July 30 – in the year 1890 – it was a Wednesday – Vincent van Gogh was buried in the village where he had died – Auvers-sur-Oise.  He had died the day before – Monday, Tuesday, July 29, from a gunshot wound. About his death I will say no more.    However, […]

It is summer and France is under a heatwave.   All – female, male, thin, fat, beautiful, ugly…  whatever – are wearing shorts or hot pants, the females in very revealing dresses and tops as well. Often when a girl/woman is raped people say: “Look what she was wearing; she was asking for it!” This summer, […]

At No. 47 Rue Raynouard in Paris’s chic 16th district (arrondissement), there is a house, one not very large or grand, but which all the same left me in silent awe. This house is where French writer Honoré de Balzac, had lived. I visited the house, today a museum – the Maison de Balzac – […]

    From 1940 to 1944, the Second World War raging, Frenchman Marcel Petiot, to all appearances a kind family doctor – and loving husband and father – was killing people in Paris. The Nazis’ killing spree having acted as background, and indeed offering protection, for his killings, he, at the start of 1944, it […]

The Aveline Museum must be the most difficult museum to get to in France: certainly, the most difficult to get to in the Paris region known as the Ile de France. I visited this museum for the first time on Thursday, May 17 this year (2018), and believe me, I nearly did not get to […]

    One would say that there is not much to the town of Bourg-la-Reine, and there is not.   However, almost every day tourists turn up: many Americans or British, but a fair number of Germans too. So, why?  Why do so many foreigners come to this town? The answer: a Sherman tank. A M4 […]

You are sitting down in a Paris restaurant, and you are hungrily waiting for your order to be served.  You have ordered Blanquet de Veau – a delicately-flavoured veal stew. And here comes the waiter, and when he puts the plate of food down on the table in front of you, you nearly faint. It […]

As far as miraculous healing is concerned, Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes and Saint Catherine Labouré of Paris come to mind. Both had had visions of the Virgin: the Virgin having spoken to them too. Bernadette was fourteen at the time and a shepherd; Catherine, twenty-four and a nun. The visions had appeared to the two […]