Salut!

Minding our language: Linda Thompson sniffs at passing the mustard

The third edition of my new column on language for The National* takes a fresh look at an old topic, false friends. Not the kind you may think but words of phrases that cause confusion. The wonderful folk-rock singer Linda Thompson provided the inspiration for my theme and I am grateful to her ...

A taste of India in Provence and a Saint-Tropez/London curry clash

It is probably fanciful to think the new Helen Mirren film, The Hundred-Foot Journey, the premiere of which she and I attended this week, though not strictly together, was inspired even a little by my story of the Pakistani brothers Wahid.

IS/ISIL, stolen youth and the sorrow and shame of Aqsa Mahmood's family

Today, the most widely read story on the website of The National, the newspaper based in Abu Dhabi which I helped to create in 2008 and still serve as a foreign correspondent, has been mine on Aqsa Mahmood, the young Scottish woman who has ruined her life and brought disgrace on her family by hooking up with the primitives of the Islamic State.

Aqsa Mahmood or Umm Layth: another depressing story of conversion to barbarism

It was just as I was putting the finishing touches to this article for The National that news reached me of Islamic State's grotesque execution of another hostage, Steven Sotloff. Steven deserved better from life, humanity deserved better than his psychopathic captors. Aqsa Mahmood (pictured, in Scotland below and with new friends above), until not too long ago an apparently intelligent, likeable Scottish student, would disagree. The only "real men", she has argued in her tweets, are the very characters who would, without trace of courage or decency, murder a helpless prisoner.

I offered a few questions via Twitter. What were her thoughts on the beheading of civilian hostages or the genocide her "real men" cheerfully commit? What about the Geneva Convention (for wimps, one presumes)? No response, but then Twitter may belatedly have frozen her poisonous account ...

French Connexion: Boris's London versus Hidalgo's Paris. One winner or gagnant gagnant?

For my latest column in The Connexion, a monthly newspaper for English speakers in France, it was agreed I should write about the competing virtues of London and Paris. I had no doubt which city I preferred but found it a tall order to make out a conclusive argument based on factual comparison alone. It must be an affair of the heart. Here, more or less, is the column ...

Albert Ebossé Bodjongo RIP: football, life and death

It is not often that I post an item of mine from The National*, Abu Dhabi at salutsunderland.com rather than here. That is because my work for that newspaper does not usually concern football. Here is a rare exception. The clip above shows the Cameroonian striker Albert Ebossé Bodjongo talking of racial abuse suffered during matches - he played in Algeria, where supporters ought to be more alert than most to prejudice - and reminding his interviewer football was a game intended to bring pleasure to people's lives. A few months after the clip was posted, he was dead. ...