I just stumbled onto this story, and tears are welling up in my eyes. Since last friday, copies of Hemingway’s A Movable Feast have been selling like hot-cakes.

Papa’s love-letter to the eternal city captures the spirit of paris; it sums up what it was like to live there in the twenties. In a way I feel something similar about London, but Paris has an extra beauty to it, an extra poetry that stays with you. As Hemingway wrote, wherever you go later in life, if you have the good fortune to have lived in Paris as a young person, it’s spirit, it’s essence, stays with you. It has an essence which not even the nazis could destroy even though they tried, and no bomb-wielding thug could ever dent.

Suddenly I feel the urge to move: 486 to north Greenwich; Jubilee to london bridge, northern line to saint pancrass. The eurostar. I can be in Monmartre by late afternoon. It’s probably what hemingway would do, but I better not. Instead, I’ll go out into my own movable feast, living my own life, relishing my own freedom as Hemingway did. That, after all, is what was attacked last Friday: liberty, diversity and life, things which these islamists are said to hate yet which cities like london and paris nourish and thrive upon, and which hemingway captured so well in his writing.