Salut!

When bright young things as well as irredeemable delinquents become Islamist terror fodder

Aqsa Mahmood: we've been this way before

The routes people take from life in the West to ISIL/ISIL/IS/Daesh make for endlessly fascinating, if deeply worrying, research. We are right to be alarmed that some, Muslims by birth or converts, are drawn to lowlife terrorism on behalf of a cause with nothing to offer humanity, but we also need to understand ...

A glance at what is known about the ISIL terrorists involved in the November 13 Paris attacks reveals a classic path of recruitment.

There is no evidence in their profiles of higher education, vocational qualifications or the potential to do well in life. Most grew up in poor immigrant areas and many had criminal records.

But recent successes of extremist groups in attracting volunteers include more examples of the enlistment of apparently intelligent young men and women who are, or were, exemplary students with bright futures.

Minding our language: Latin's all Greek to a dumbed-down generation

From the Fiske Icelandic Collection of Cornell University Library, New York

There was only so far I could take a discussion* on the merits of studying the classics. My own Latin studies petered out early in secondary education and I do not think a holiday in Corfu and a weekend in Thessaloniki will have equipped me for ancient Greek. But I do know dumbed-down hack presentation when I see or hear it ...

Between the languages of ancient civilisations and the foibles of today’s news media, there is some distance. But if we allow for ­diversion, a link can just about be found.

In a search for inspiration on the theme of the “dumbing down” of modern journalism, two unrelated sources commended themselves: Jan Leeming, a British broadcaster whose news bulletins were models of serious, calm delivery, and a long-in-the-tooth former colleague with strident views on how newspapers express themselves.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: industrial slaughter as a theme park, ghoulish but necessary

Four days before the world commemorated the 71st anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, I walked the same ground where - to quote Unesco's sombre words - "1.5 million people, among them a great number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured and murdered".

The first image is of the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was hanged for freely admitted war crimes in 1947. What he willingly did and had done at the behest of his Third Reich masters challenged my lifelong abhorrence of capital punishment. I resisted the challenge, as I do the temptation to loathe all Germans for what some, even many, did - with enthusiasm or under orders it would have been fatal to disobey - during the wretched period until the Nazis were defeated, but would dutifully have throttled him myself given the opportunity and strength. I hope the distinction is clear.

From Gainsbourg, Hardy and Biolay to Cats on Trees: French pop and protectionism

All good things must come to an end. I have enjoyed writing monthly columns for The Connexion, an indispensable newspaper for English speakers in France. But it seemed the right time to catapult the column up to that great repository of journalistic endeavour in the sky. And that is what I have done.

This, held over from the beginning of last month because of the Paris attacks, was my last offering. I reproduce how it was submitted; there will have been minor tweaks and/or cuts before publication ...

Salut! est toujours Charlie, one year on from 2015's first mass murder

How France's three dailies for children reported the mass murder at Charlie Hebdo

Thursday is the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings. So much vile terrorist activity has followed that the impact of that crime has diminished somewhat. There has even been backlash. One writer at The Observer said the other day that The New Yorker, of all publications, had run - just a few days after the murders - a 'a filthy and stupid libel ... a riotously ignorant article that took Charlie to task for its evident Nazi-standard racism'. It was rather more than that in truth but still suffered - in my view - from occasional inaccuracy and glaringly poor argument. Here is my own broader take*, not for The New Yorker but for The National, on what 2015 brought us and what to learn from it ...