ithaca rising 🇫🇷 🇬🇧

Mobilise the Old Guard. They're sending in their historians now.

@_ilestlor @guyros48 Chapeau Strasbourg 🎩

Deux vrais élus strasbourgeois prêts à envoyer balader leurs états majors parisiens pour défendre l’honneur de leur ville en battant LFI, ça a de la gueule !! 🔥

@GeneralsofWWII Should do one on Gen Bill Slim. One of the most underrated generals of World WarTwo.

Can you guess which is our #1 most downloaded episode? #xpoll #generals #ww2 #ww2generals #history #vodcast

@AndNapoleon The Route Napoléon - known to the road signs as the N85 - is one of those French drives that sounds more like a chapter in a grand historical romance than a mere holiday jaunt. But it's well worth it if anyone is so inclined.

#DidYouKnow that when Napoleon escaped from exile on the island of Elba in 1815, he marched back to power along a route that today is literally called the Route Napoléon? On March 1, 1815, Napoleon landed near the town of Golfe‑Juan with only about 1,000 soldiers. Instead of taking the obvious coastal road—where royalist forces could easily stop him—he led his small army through the rugged Alps, passing through towns like Grasse, Digne‑les‑Bains, Gap, and Grenoble on the way to Paris. The most famous moment came near Grenoble when royal troops blocked his path. Napoleon stepped forward alone and declared: “Soldiers, if there is among you a man who would kill his Emperor, here I am.” 💂‍♀️ Instead of firing, the soldiers shouted “Vive l’Empereur!” and joined him. ⚔️ That march—about 200 miles (320 km)—became one of the most dramatic political comebacks in history. Today the Route Napoléon is a scenic highway (N85) that follows the path of Napoleon’s march from Golfe-Juan to Grenoble, marked by imperial eagle signs along the road. #france #travel #collectible #routenapoleon

@JulienHoez Nothing tastes better than schadenfreude.

Europeans as Donald Trump has a breakdown over his war in Iran and the fact that he has no allies anymore.

While not fully fluent, Carrie Fisher does a decent stab at speaking French. Kudos to her to overcoming any fear and just going for it. The French will love you just for trying. 🇫🇷

No, Hunter S. Thompson and Anthony Burgess were not friends, whatever romantic gloss some might try to slap on that infamous 1973 exchange. The notion of chummy literary camaraderie here is pure fantasy, the sort of thing that gets peddled when people mistake a spectacular insult for an invitation to tea. Burgess, marooned in Rome and apparently paralysed by the deadline for a modest Rolling Stone thinkpiece, fired off a letter suggesting he might substitute a freshly minted 50,000-word novella on the human condition instead. Thompson - then playing some sort of editorial hitman for the magazine - responded with one of his trademark volcanic dispatches, a masterpiece of gonzo abuse that called the proposal "lame, half-mad bullshit," dismissed it as "limey bullshit," and demanded the original piece pronto, or else. Whether the letter actually landed in Burgess’s hands is debatable. Some say it was more for the amusement of the Rolling Stone staff. In any case, the tone left no room for misunderstanding. This was not banter between equals, still less the prelude to a lifelong bromance. Burgess, to his credit, eventually delivered something - a short piece titled "Juice from A Clockwork Orange," which duly appeared in the magazine. It was no novella, and there’s no record of further contact, mutual back-slapping, or even grudging respect. Just one brief, brutal collision between two very different literary planets

Strasbourg. Our home town. At 142 metres it held the title of world's tallest building for over two centuries, a medieval boast that still looks cool. Victor Hugo called it a gigantic and delicate marvel. More accurately, it's the architectural equivalent of a tall story told with perfect seriousness, beautiful and impossible to ignore. It still has the best Christmas market in France.

There’s probably no cooler street view than this

This is what a real museum does. Having briefly worked as a researcher at the Imperial War Museum years ago, I'm appalled by their shortsighted decision to dump that iconic collection of pure valour and courage in action.

Because Brutus trusted that silver held more value than loyalty.

Nailed it.

The scene is epic because it captures that precise, heart-stopping instant when despair has all but won the day and then, from nowhere, the horns of the Rohirrim split the dawn into a defiance of hope. Peter Jackson's camera knows exactly what it's doing. It holds on the thunder of hooves and the rising sun behind Théoden's riders just long enough to make you feel the impossible weight of those few seconds when everything that was lost might still be snatched back. And then he unleashes that orchestral tidal wave, and suddenly you remember why these old myths still matter.

On 15 March, T.A. 3019 in Tolkien's Middle-earth: the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The horns of the Rohirrim are heard at cockcrow. We all get goosebumps. Here is the scene as depicted in New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

"It's Shakespeare, Jim, but not as we know it." William Shatner going boldly go where no man has gone before.

Cave Idus Martias - "Beware the Ides of March." The tragedy of the Ides of March was never merely the murder of one man in the Senate House. It was something far more chilling: the sight of Rome's noblest sons, steeped in the antique pieties of the Republic, raising their daggers against the one leader who might yet have healed the rotting commonwealth without tearing it apart entirely. Brutus and Cassius, those paragons of high-minded virtue, struck in the name of liberty. Yet what did they imagine would follow? They had no plan for the legions that worshipped Caesar as a god, no hold over the Roman mob that hungered for bread and games, no vision beyond the theatrical flourish of "the Republic restored." They dreamed that the blood of the tyrant would revive the old freedoms, that the Senate would rise phoenix-like from the gore. But Rome was weary -exhausted by a century of civil wars, faction against faction, patrician against plebeian. What the city craved above all was order, not the ghost of an ideal. And so the conspirators stumbled. They stood frozen in the Forum as the city held its breath. They fled the capital like men pursued by Furies. At Philippi, the great showdown dissolved into rumour, panic, and despair: misheard signals, premature suicides, victory snatched away in the very hour it seemed within grasp. Their amateur conspiracy did not save the Republic, it merely cleared the stage for what was already inevitable. What if they had stayed their hands? Let Caesar live and march east against the Parthians? The old conqueror might have avenged Crassus at last, heaped the treasury with eastern gold, and returned to Rome more formidable than ever. And then he might have perhaps been content to drape his supremacy in the forms of the Republic. Military glory and administrative reform might have steadied the state without the naked crown. Or suppose they had struck at Antony too on that fateful morning. Without the consul's golden voice and ruthless energy to rally the Caesarians, the path of young Octavian would have been far more treacherous. A fragile senatorial restoration might have limped on for another generation or two, buying time before the inevitable. In the end, though, the lesson is as old as politics itself, and as bitter. When a republic has grown too vast, too corrupt, too riven by hatreds to govern itself any longer, the dagger that fells the would-be autocrat does not restore freedom. It only sweeps aside the obstacle, making room for the colder, more calculating successor who waits in the wings. Caesar's blood didn't redeem the Republic. It merely anointed the man who would bury it.

Oof. This cuts deep.

I'm sure Mr. Bond was shaken but not stirred.

If you interpret “intelligence” as metaphorical shorthand for a particular machine capacity, this sounds anodyne. If he thinks it’s same kind of intelligence humans have, it becomes ghastly and diabolical. When you realize people can’t tell the difference, you see the problem.

Belmondo was one of the best ever action stars. Not only were his own stunts breathtaking, they were done with characteristic Gallic flair.

Fun piece, French and British intel top brass have been using the France-England "crunch" rugby game as an opportunity to network together for the last 15 years. I would have loved to be in the stands with MI6 when France beat England 52-10 in Twickenham!

It's super tough to pick between The Living Daylights (1987) and No Way Out (1987) as the standout spy thriller of the 1980s. Both deliver gripping Cold War intrigue with strong performances and authentic-feeling espionage tension. The Living Daylights shines with Timothy Dalton's grounded, serious take on James Bond, featuring realistic defection plots, shadowy betrayals, and high-stakes operations across Europe and Afghanistan that echo real 1980s geopolitical anxieties. It was a refreshing change. Moreover fans of Bond rightly felt it got close to the Bond in the Fleming books. No Way Out, with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, excels in its taut naval conspiracy, bureaucratic paranoia, and cat-and-mouse investigation inside the U.S. government. It was brilliant in creating a claustrophobic sense of dread that's hard to beat. The tension was top notch. When focusing purely on realistic spy storytelling - especially the portrayal of deep-cover moles, institutional cover-ups, and moral ambiguity - No Way Out edges ahead. It has to. This is really thanks to its devastating final twist. It flipped the entire narrative and exposed the protagonist as the long-buried Soviet agent "Yuri" in a chilling, believable way that landed like a gut punch.

You can only keep one! Which is the best 1980s spy thriller: • No Way Out • The Living Daylights • The Falcon and the Snowman • Firefox

Watch Le Cercle Rouge because it is the cinema of cool distilled to its purest, most glacial essence: Alain Delon, fedora tilted just so, moves through a Paris of rain-slicked streets and existential shadows like a man who has already accepted that fate has drawn a red circle around him and his fellow doomed professionals. The plot is elegantly spare - a recently paroled thief named Corey (Delon) joins forces with an escaped convict and a haunted former cop to pull off an audacious jewel heist in broad daylight - yet every decision feels like the closing of a trap that was always waiting. What makes it one of the greatest heist movies ever shot is Melville's ruthless minimalism - the 25 minute silent burglary sequence unfolds with the patient, hypnotic precision of a safecracker at work, every footfall and breath held in suspense. It's a bravura sequence with almost no dialogue and no underscoring score. It's Melville at his most audacious, turning the act of burglary into a kind of wordless ballet performed by men who treat crime as a solemn craft rather than a thrill. The true tension arises not from noise or frenzy but from the stark purity of professionalism executed in near-vacuum, where the absence of chatter reveals the characters' isolation, their fatalistic grace, and the inexorable pull of destiny that Melville has already inscribed in the film's opening red circle.