Word: french
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Many authors dream of getting their books onto best-seller lists, but few pull it off with the panache of French writer Muriel Barbery. Her second novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, has been at or near the top of France's sales charts for 102 straight weeks since its September 2006 publication. It has been translated into a half-dozen languages and is being adapted for film. In South Korea and Italy, the book has generated the same sort of enthusiasm and devotion that made it a publishing phenomenon in France. Now, with the release of an English translation...
Class-consciousness and conflict are central to Barbery's story, which some French critics have deemed a heavy-handed satire of waning French social stereotypes. That reading misses her point, Barbery says. "For me, those factors were only anecdotal in telling the story of these two solitary women, and how they arranged their lives to give full rein to their passions," says Barbery by phone from Kyoto, which she and her husband adopted as home earlier this year. "To be honest, I was just creating characters who love the things I do, and who allowed me to celebrate that through...
...Thankfully, Britain's friends overseas have been only too happy to offer a sense of perspective. French officials have apparently suggested the dominance of Britain's cycling team in Beijing may be down more to performance-enhancing drugs than our bulldog spirit. (If it'd raced as a separate nation, the cycle team would currently be ninth in the medal table.) And John Coates, head of the Australian Olympic Committee, was even gracious enough to applaud a British gold in the pool as "not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap...
...about to sun-bathe during Olympic competition, the men should be, too. At the very least, uniform parity would mean that the athletes' sun-block bills would be more equitable. And given that one of the places where beach volleyball first gained popularity in the 1920s was a French nudist colony (Franconville, a northwestern suburb of Paris, in case you're wondering) a briefer male costume would also have historical resonance...
...deadly force that the Taliban now pack as a result is evident in the escalating number of attacks - and casualties - inflicted on NATO-led forces in Afghanistan. Indeed even as the French paratroopers were being cut down by Taliban snipers in a valley east of Kabul Monday, two separate suicide bombing attacks struck US bases elsewhere in Afghanistan. The growing frequency and audacity of Taliban offensives are producing a spiraling death count among international forces - 183 of whom have been killed thus far this year, compared to 232 fatalities for all of 2007. Significantly, an Afghanistan scenario once considered under...