Salut!

Troubling times: the sorrows and rewards of reporting Northern Ireland

A new book has just come my way. Reporting the Troubles brings together the stories of journalists who covered 30 years of civil conflict in Northern Ireland. It was edited by two outstanding practitioners of the reporting trade, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, and is a valuable addition to the great body of published work on those sad times and the struggle to achieve and then maintain what the late Mo Mowlam, when NI secretary, used to call a 'flawed peace' ...

Just over half a century ago, an October Saturday in the city of Derry began in unseasonal sunshine but degenerated into deep gloom with a shameful attack by baton-wielding RUC officers on civil rights marchers.

Awful an event as this was, no one present is likely to have guessed that he or she was witnessing what many feel was the starting point of 30 years of bloody conflict in, according to taste or allegiance, Northern Ireland, Ulster, the Six Counties or simply "the North".

Bill Bryson: further notes, sweet and sour, from a partner-in-grumpiness

Click anywhere in this sentence to buy the book at the Salut! Amazon link for under a tenner, under a fiver even depending on format

Welcome, Bill Bryson, to Salut!s unashamed tendency to write about books when it comes across them, not necessarily when they first come out ...

Bill Bryson, on his own candid admission, is something of a curmudgeon. That is not all we have in common. We both worked for newspapers, local and national, and became rather pedantic about aspects of our trade. We enjoy the English countryside, beer (though, being American, he is more of a lager fan than I could ever be), Indian food and sport (he'd say sports).

There our similarities more or less end. Although we both write for a living, he does so with huge and deserved success, and I do not.

His 1996 book, Notes from a Small Island, describing his introduction to the UK as a young American backpacker starting inauspiciously in Dover, was and remains a bestseller. Other books have followed, as well as television programmes, lecture tours and a university chancellorship (in blessed Durham). He no longer needs to work for newspapers. I, meanwhile, struggle to complete my first book, a proper one as opposed to the single chapters contributed to a couple of compilations; I still file copy diligently to newspapers long after I ceased to be in their actual employment and the highest academic honour in County Durham that I can claim was being asked by my great friend Pete Sixsmith to talk to his sixth form liberal studies group about journalism.

Michel Houellebecq review: when stopping Le Pen makes France an Islamic-led state

The grim prospect of Marine Le Pen at the Elysée unites the French political establishment in reluctant support for the Muslim candidate for the presidency. Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission (translated from the French by a New York Francophile, Loris Stein**) describes what follows this imaginary election deal ...

To the western liberal conscience, few election outcomes could be worse than the suddenly plausible scenario of victory for one of the far right movements and their ragbags of nationalists, racists and fascists.

Old books, new reviews: Laura Florand, pre-Chocolate Age, blamelessly on Paris

Salut! has a noble tradition of getting round to writing about books years, even decades, after they appeared.

Since Laura Florand, a Francophile and swottily French-speaking American academic, published her first book, Blame it on Paris, she has produced a string of bestsellers**. Her later works include The Chocolate Heart and The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) and doubtless others having nothing to do with cocoa; she also holds down a job in the romance faculty - calm down, it means languages - at Duke University, North Carolina.

But I am concerned with the debut.

Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who changed the world

On this day 100 years ago, Gavrilo Princip narrowly escaped the death penalty and was sentenced instead to 20 years' imprisonment for shooting dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, four months earlier in the city of Sarajevo.

The prosecution had argued in vain that his birth certificate was mistaken, making him 20 and therefore eligible to hang.

The impact of Princip's crime was greater than he could have envisaged in his wilder dreams. It propelled international powers, by domino effect starting with the empire's declaration of war on Serbia, into the First World War and profoundly influenced events throughout the remainder of the young century.

From no clothes to no show: nudists' loss was La Ramade's gain

Chez Jo

A tale of four restaurants in which I manage to discuss naked bodies, rotten weather, good food (of course) and proof that the customer is not always right ...

So would you like the aïoli, sir? It was the dish of the day at Chez Zette, a restaurant I'd been meaning to visit for two years or more without ever getting round to making a booking.

Gigi, Cézanne and exploring the Aix-en-Provence of 1902

Gill Baconnier is not the first author to write about Aix-en-Provence in 1902, or indeed of Paul Cézanne's connection with the city. The photograph of the impressionist painter's studio there is taken from Cézanne à Aix en 1902 by Jules Borély.

Irish times: Edna O'Brien's literary spat with Fintan O'Toole

On an astonishing clear and bright day in County Donegal, I abandoned a friend with whom I had, if truth be known, looked forward to a leisurely and quite possibly Guinness-fuelled evening, and headed south for County Clare.

It was a Saturday and, since I worked for The Daily Telegraph, theoretically a day off. But the day before, I had written from Belfast about the strange case of the mother, toddler and priest who were missing in the west of Ireland amid fears that they had been abducted.

Those Amazon books. And Sarah came (two)

A return to Darlington, with the pictorial evidence, is imminent, and the police stabbings will force me to take a look before long (as urged by Bill and Keith) at the terrible decline of Ealing. First, because time is short, some welcome news plus some more plugs ...

Click on any Amazon link down the sidebar columns or here if you wish to use Salut! to buy vouchers, Kindles, books mentioned here or any product they sell. There's another link at the end of this posting but clicking on the images themselves won't take you anywhere ...

Another update on books you can order via Salut! for Christmas, and this time an occasion for a minor, almost family celebration.

Back when I was a humble Telegraph blogger, Sarah Hague was one of my earliest and most regular electronic correspondents.

When the humbling turned to tumbling, as in the fall of the axe on the Telegraph Paris blogger's head, Sarah joined the droves of readers flocking in Salut!'s direction and has remained an intermittent visitor ever since.

Many of us knew her to be not only a French blogger in her own right, but on the verge of publishing real books.

I thought the time had come to congratulate her on her debut as an author, but it turns out to be a follow-up.

Let Sarah take up her own story:

"Actually I have two books out and a story builder with another on the way, all part of the educational resources I've been writing with Bongo LLP.

The story builder helps children write their own version of Slim the Ogre as a downloadable software which can then be sent to a professional printer and turned into a real book. There's a home version for individual stories and a school version where the whole class gets to write a story each and each one is published in a class book. That is available at Bongo LLP.

I've also set up Facebook pages for Slim and Floppy. Just type in the search box Slim the Ogre or Floppy the Monster and they'll come up.

Slim the Ogre (aimed at ages 9-12) is about an ogre who is a vegetarian in a world of human-meat eaters. He gets sick eating vegetables but doesn't like the taste of human meat. His doctor suggests he help organise a food festival 'Human Food or Humans for Food' where human chefs and ogre chefs compete against each other in a fierce competition to find the best food.

It's full of disgusting snot and bad behaviour, with some fantastic drawings by Russell Young, one of the UK's most promising up and coming young artists (currently studying at the RCA).

Floppy the Monster is for younger children (2-6) and tells the story of Emily and her soft toy. Floppy gets dropped in the supermarket in the first story and is found by the mean and horrid Momo Morris who doesn't want to give him back. Floppy discovers he has some magic powers which help save the day but not without coming off the worse for wear in a tugging struggle.

The illustrations by Sybil Harris capture perfectly the humour and charm of the story and ensure that both boys and girls will enjoy it."

Happy to give you the career-break Salut! plug, Sarah. I expect no less when my turn comes.

And here's a reminder of what else can be had from these parts. All dirt cheap, and no need to fear the Amazon commission is likely to make Monsieur Salut rich:

One late addition to my list: Victoria Hislop's The Return has an intriguing if implausible contemporary story wrapped around a gripping account of what the Spanish Civil War was like for ordinary people. See more here.

When this posting first appeared, I threatened to bring it to the top every so often in the hope of concentrating minds and getting at least some Salut! readers to buy their Amazon-marketed products here.

In the months that followed, I have done no such thing. But while hoping to restore normal service soon, I will settle for now for giving the item a fresh top-of-the-pile outing to cover me until my hand has recovered from a recent op.

To recap, Salut! costs more in incidental expenses to run than it has ever earned. If its author's time has any value, the profit and loss account begins to look sad indeed.

You can help Salut! try to make ends meet, at the same time as helping yourselves, by buying Amazon products via this site.

I am not the world's fastest of book-readers (and am even slower when it comes to writing them), but have a few titles from this year that I am happy to recommend:

* Philip Delves Broughton

Bel Ombra, a flawed but beautifully written and captivating account of the war years as experienced by inhabitants and occupying Nazi forces on Porquerolles, one of the lovely islands lying in the Med just off Toulon

From notes on Harvard to notes from a small French island

My former colleague Philip Delves Broughton, last but one correspondent to occupy the grand Paris bureau of The Daily Telegraph (I was the last), has written a best seller about his time on an MBA course at Harvard.

The raison d'être of the course, I assume, is to show its participants - who pay an awful lot of money for the privilege - how to get rich.