Annie Ernaux and the bourgeosie's ‘extraordinary erotic capabilities'
'I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published,' Annie Ernaux once admitted. 'To write as if I were about to die.' If by that she meant writing with brazen candour, she has succeeded. The most intimate human experiences — grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private 'primordial savagery' — are laid bare throughout the prolific French author's works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception. It is the latest in a series of reprints of her books from the independent publisher Fitzcarraldo.
The deadly sin that this particular memoir focuses on is envy, with Ernaux reluctantly handing over an ex-boyfriend to an anonymous new woman. 'The strangest
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The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Frederick Forsyth obituary
Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and 'bashed out' The Day of the Jackal, he 'never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist'. Forsyth, who has died aged 86, also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain's armed forces, but it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered. Forsyth's manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher's sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle – an event that everyone knew did not happen. The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal – an anonymous English assassin – almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader's sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim. It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers' of America Edgar award for best first novel, attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits – he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was 'pathetic at money'. The 1972 paperback edition of The Day of the Jackal was reprinted 33 times in 18 years and is still in print, but while readers were happy to be taken in by Forsyth's painstakingly researched details (about everything from faked passports to assembling a sniper's rifle), the critics and the crime-writing establishment were far from impressed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Spy and Suspense Stories, published in 1982, by which time Forsyth's sales were well into the millions, declared rather loftily that 'authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers', and the critic Julian Symons dismissed Forsyth as having 'no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise'. It was a formula that readers clearly approved of, with the subsequent novels in that original three-book deal, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974), being both bestsellers and successful films. Novellas, collections of short stories and more novels were to follow. These included The Fourth Protocol (1984), which had a cameo role for the British spy-in-exile Kim Philby and was also successfully filmed, with a screenplay by Forsyth and starring Michael Caine and a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and, against type, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), a sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Nothing, however, was to match the impact of The Day of the Jackal and when a Guardian journalist spotted a copy in a London flat used by the world's most wanted terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or 'Carlos', in 1975, the British press dubbed him Carlos the Jackal, with no need to explain the reference. Born in Ashford, Kent, Frederick was the son of Phyllis and Frederick Sr, shopkeepers at 4 North Street – his mother's dress business operated on the ground floor and his father sold furs on the first floor. He was educated at Tonbridge school, where supportive teachers and summer holidays abroad ensured that Frederick excelled at French, German and Russian. At the age of 16, he enrolled on an RAF flying scholarship course that brought him a pilot's licence by the age of 17 and eased his way into the RAF proper for his national service, where he obtained his pilot's 'wings' and flew Vampire jets as the youngest pilot in the service. However, when he failed in his ambition to be posted to a frontline squadron, he opted for a change of career and in 1958 entered journalism as a trainee with the Eastern Daily Press in their King's Lynn office. In the autumn of 1961 he set his sights on Fleet Street, and his fluency with languages (which now included Spanish) got him a job with Reuters press agency. In May 1962, he was posted to Reuters' office in Paris, where De Gaulle was the target of numerous assassination attempts by disaffected Algerians. The experience was not lost on Forsyth, but before he could put it to good use in The Day of the Jackal, there were other journalistic postings, a war to survive and a non-fiction book to write. The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. By 1990, Forsyth had undergone an amicable divorce from Carrie, but a far less amicable separation from his investment broker and his life savings, and claimed to have lost more than £2m in a share fraud. To recoup his losses, Forsyth threw himself into writing fiction, producing another string of bestsellers, although none had the impact of his first three novels. He was appointed CBE in 1997 and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2012. In 2016 he announced that he would write no more thrillers and that his memoir The Outsider (2015), which revealed that he had worked as an unpaid courier for MI6, or 'The Firm' as he called it, would be his swansong. He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Moment cops dig up Channel migrant dinghies hidden deep under French beach in blow to smugglers
CHANNEL migrant smugglers are hiding boats deep under French beaches, police have revealed. A haul of nautical equipment was found by officers buried along the beach at the resort of Wimereux. 4 4 4 The find included an inflatable dinghy, an outboard motor, lifejackets and oars. The gangs are stowing their boats underground at night and directing migrants to dig them up, inflate them and set off on crossings. A French officer told The Sun: 'The equipment was all neatly packaged and ready for use when the migrants arrived. 'This follows lots of cars being driven by the smugglers being intercepted, so that the boats can be confiscated. 'They now seem to be hiding the boats late at night, leaving them there for a while, and then telling their clients where to find them.' Migrants are paying up to £1,300 for a perilous passage to Britain on the dug-up boats. They can be packed with 80 people — but are designed to carry 20. Pictures taken by Calais police show a French officer using a shovel to dig up a boat from the sands at Wimereux last week. Huge numbers of migrants are now reaching England's south coast, lured by the promise of free hotels, healthcare and little prospect of being deported. A record 1,194 arrived on a single day last month while French officers stopped just 184 out of 1,378. Starmer 'loses control' as over 1,000 migrants cross Channel in biggest daily total of 2025 – as French cops watch on The total figure for 2025 is now close to 15,000, the highest figure recorded in the first five months of a year. The 42 per cent increase has heaped pressure on Sir Keir Starmer 's Labour government, whose pledge to smash smuggling gangs has failed to deliver results. Figures also show French police have intercepted just 38 per cent of migrants in small boats this year. That's down from 45 per cent in 2024, despite a £480million UK handout for extra officers and surveillance equipment on beaches. In the year to April, there were 33 boats with more than 80 people on board, compared with 11 in 2024 and one in 2023, figures from French and UK Home Office show. The Sun revealed yesterday that .
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Just how psychopathic are surgeons?
These are the people we trust to hold a sharpened knife above our bare bellies and press down until they see blood. We let them tinker with our hearts, brains and bowels while we lie unconscious beneath their gloved hands. Surgeons live in a world of terrifying margins, where the difference of a millimetre can be the difference between life and death. That level of precision demands an extraordinary calm, or what you could also call a cold detachment. But what happens when that same self-possession curdles into something darker? In recent weeks, two surgeons have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In France, Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced for abusing hundreds of children – some while they lay anaesthetised in his care. In the UK, plastic surgeon Peter Brooks was convicted of the attempted murder of fellow consultant Graeme Perks, whom he stabbed after breaking into his home in Nottinghamshire. Today, Brooks was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years at Loughborough Courthouse. It would, of course, be absurd to taint an entire profession with the acts of two individuals. But it does resurface a long-standing, uncomfortable question: might the very traits that make a surgeon brilliant also mask something far more troubling? 'When people hear the word psychopath, they tend to think of serial killers and rapists,' says Dr Kevin Dutton, a psychologist and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths. 'But the truth is that certain psychopathic traits – focus, emotional dispassion, ruthlessness, self-confidence – can predispose you to success, and in an operating theatre, they really come to the fore.' Dutton has spent much of his career trying to prove that 'bad psychopaths' – people who have these characteristics but who can't regulate them – are the ones who commit crimes. A 'good psychopath', by contrast, is someone who can dial those qualities up and down at whim. He recalls one neurosurgeon who was regularly brought to tears by bits of classical music, but who also said, 'Emotion is entropy. I have hunted it to extinction over the years.' Similarly, a cardiothoracic surgeon told him that once a patient was under, he no longer saw them as a person – just a piece of meat. 'Once you care, you are walking an emotional tightrope,' says Dutton, 'but if you see the human body in front of you as a puzzle to solve, then you are more likely to save their life.' 'There's a ruthless part of me' Gabriel Weston, a London-based surgeon and the author of Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, describes her profession as one that requires you to 'flick off a switch'. Sent to boarding school at a young age (much of British surgery is the product of elite schools), Weston learnt early how to detach emotionally – a skill she found served her well in the theatre. 'If you asked my family, they'd say I'm very emotional in that I cry in films or at art or literature,' she says. 'But there's a ruthless part of me. I use that in surgery – and in other parts of life where emotion just gets in the way.' Over time, Weston learnt to distinguish between two kinds of surgeons: those who switch their feelings back on once they leave the operating room, and those who never do. 'They don't just have psychopathic traits,' she says. 'They live in that space permanently.' They can also come with a reputation for being not just difficult, but dangerous. Harry Thompson*, a British abdominal surgeon, describes a world of towering egos and simmering aggression. 'If you think about it, all surgeons were in the top five of their class,' he says. 'They are all very competitive, and many play sports: they want to prove they are better than everyone. And if you are at the forefront of major surgery, you think you are invincible. It's a boiling-house environment of jealousy, envy and hatred.' He recalls one consultant who stabbed a plain-clothes policeman with a disposable scalpel after being stopped for speeding en route to the theatre. Another smashed a ward office clock when a nurse arrived five minutes late. Physical assaults were, he says, more common than you would think. 'I was in one operation when a student, John, was an hour and a half late, because he overslept. The surgeon thumped the student's head against the theatre wall until he was unconscious, screamed, 'Nobody move!' then started kicking him. No one ever saw John again.' Nor is the patient always spared. 'When I was training, I saw one surgeon thump a patient for removing a drain from his own bottom after an operation because it had become painful,' says Thompson. 'The patient only admitted this (in tears) after the surgeon had made the nurses and junior doctors line up and interrogated each one in turn about who had done it.' Thompson used to work with Simon Bramhall – the liver surgeon who made headlines and was later struck off for branding his initials onto patients' livers using a laser. 'Simon had always been a bit mad,' says Thompson. 'He was fascinated by the programme Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and he always wore a white suit [like the character Hopkirk], tie, shoes and socks.' As for tattooing his patients' organs: the initials were discovered by his colleagues only during a second surgery when his once-subtle etching was now grotesquely enlarged by liver damage. While Bramhall's actions sparked public outrage, some in the medical community were nonplussed. Perhaps because this is a far more commonplace occurrence than we realise: an article in Harper's Magazine cited examples of anonymous ophthalmic surgeons who had lasered their initials onto retinas, and orthopaedic surgeons who had etched theirs into bone cement. 'Why would you do that? Ego, of course,' says Dutton, 'and it isn't incidental in surgery. It's selected for. From the moment you start training, you have to fight – quite literally – for your space at the operating table.' 'I find it very freeing not to be pleasant' Dutton researched which of the various disciplines within the profession had the highest rates of psychopathy, and the results are revealing. Number one is neurosurgery (which is bad luck for any fans of Grey's Anatomy), followed by cardiothoracic or heart surgery and then orthopaedic. 'The last one is brutal as you have to smash people's bones,' says Dutton. 'Cardio more than anything is about life and death, but neurosurgery is particularly interesting to me. I think it's because this is the only branch of surgery where, if something goes wrong, you leave the patient permanently crippled or blinded or incapacitated, so only very few people can take such a calculated risk under pressure.' And though these traits are often seen as typically male, women are by no means exempt. Weston says the most difficult surgeon she ever worked under was a woman. 'She was very attractive and well-liked – mostly for being gorgeous and good at her job – but privately she made my life hell. Maybe she didn't like another woman being on the team but she did that horrible thing that women do of presenting this incredibly benign face while being very cruel in private. For months, she blamed me for mistakes that weren't mine, stole credit for my diagnoses, and made me feel like my surgical skills were terrible. She was truly villainous.' And yet, Weston admits, the operating theatre offers her a rare freedom: 'If you are a woman who is quite tough and unsentimental, surgery is a really amazing environment in which you can be yourself. There are many areas of my life – mainly motherhood, but also writing – where there is an expectation that I will be softer than I am. Like Simone de Beauvoir, I find it very freeing not to be pleasant.' Perhaps there is something in all of this (criminal and violent behaviour aside) that we, as patients, secretly find reassuring. We don't want our surgeons to hesitate. We don't want them to be emotional or anxious. We want them to be brilliant: laser-focused, supremely confident, even terrifying if that's what it takes to save us. In life, we dislike arrogance. On the operating table, many of us yearn for it. 'I had one boss,' says Thompson, 'a French surgeon. He used to say: 'There are the porters, the nurses, the managers – and then there are the surgeons. Above them, God. And above God? Me.''
