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... the film to see is the five-hour-long La Bataille de Gaulle. This is actually two films with, irritatingly, two titles per film – L’âge de fer (The Iron Age) in France and De Gaulle: Résistance in the UK, and J’écris ton nom (I write my name) in France and De Gaulle: Liberté in the UK. Yes, both are about Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War.

We Brits have never been good at coping with heatwaves. How will we cope in thirty years time if this forecast from the UK Meteorological Office is correct?

In 1485, Johannes Trithemius*, abbot of Sponheim in what is now western Germany, wrote a passionate treatise explaining why the newly invented printing press was a dangerous mistake. For Trithemius, the act of writing brought monks closer to God, and the printing press was a dangerous error. Besides the proximity to God, Trithemius was concerned about the source of his Benedictine monastery's income.

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I crossed the Arctic Circle heading north. I wasn’t aiming for Greenland, hoping to stake my claim before Trump got there; I was chasing the receding polar night line. We never quite caught up with it; we arrived at Norway’s northernmost point three days late. North Cape had daylight. But the interval between nominal sunrise and nominal sunset was supposedly an hour and a half; it was hard to tell...

On 28th Dec 2025, we heard of the death of Brigitte Bardot, perhaps one of the greatest sex symbols of the 20th century. Yet fame doesn’t always last: neither my younger wife nor my two youngest daughters had ever heard of her. But I am glad our editor has such a good memory because he reminded me of a story that I told him more than half a century ago. The story takes me back to 1966, two years before I left school.