The World is Talking About…

France is Talking About...British Invasions

Tourists Evoke Wartime Memories

Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944 and Help! The English are Invading Us! are bestsellers in France; Madame Patrice and the English invaders of old and new

By Joanna Robertson, BBC News, From Our Own Correspondent

Paris, France - Saturday lunchtime at Le Dome café on Boulevard Montparnasse, and the regulars are feeling somewhat squeezed.

The usual midweek mix of locals - with the odd table of tourists - swells for 24 noisy weekend hours - from Saturday lunch to Sunday lunch - with British day or weekend trippers fresh off the Eurostar, ordering the Dome's fabled seafood in rather dreadful French or "shouted-so-you-might-understand" English....

At her usual place, shielded from the hubbub by her hat-of-the-day and the fronds of a brass-potted aspidistra, sits Madame Elisabeth Patrice.

Ninety years old, elegant, spry and beautiful, she is behind her daily dose of uplifting effervescence - a single glass of Deutz champagne (as recommended by her cardiologist).

Madame Patrice has a great many hats: "Simply hundreds - I adore them," she confesses. She keeps these hats in two large wardrobes - one here in Paris, and the other at her seaside house near Deauville in Normandy.

In 1944, when the Allies finally arrived, Madame Patrice donned a carefully preserved "confection of a hat", as she called it, and slipped her war-thinned feet into yellow shoes to dance through the streets of her liberated city....

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Baghdad is Talking About...Booksellers

Violence Changes Fortunes Of Storied Baghdad Street

Mutanabi Street is a link to Baghdad's past glory, less a place than an extension of Baghdadis' souls.

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post Foreign Service

Baghdad , Iraq - A silence has fallen upon Mutanabi Street.

In the buttery sunlight, faded billboards hang from old buildings. Iron gates seal entrances to bookstores and stationery shops. On this Friday, like the past 13 Fridays, the violence has taken its toll. There is not a customer around, only ghosts.

Perched on a red chair outside a closet-sized bookshop, the only one open, Naim al-Shatri is nearly in tears. Short, with thin gray hair and dark, brooding eyes, his voice is grim. This is normally his busiest day, but he hasn't had a single sale. A curfew is approaching.

Soon, his sobs break the stillness. "Is this Iraq?" he asked no one in particular, pointing at the gritty, trash-covered street as the scent of rotting paper and sewage mingled in the air.

It is a question many of the booksellers on Mutanabi Street are asking. Here, in the intellectual ground zero of Baghdad, they are the guardians of a literary tradition that has survived empire and colonialism, monarchy and dictatorship. In the heady days after the U.S.-led invasion, Mutanabi Street pulsed with the promise of freedom.

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See also

• From December 2003, " The Booksellers of Mutanabi Street", by Jackie Lyden, National Public Radio