Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780330427616
ISBN: 033042761X
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Pages: 454
Publication Date: July 04, 2008
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador

---

Related Items:

• Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul
• The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
• The Road Home
• Speak the Culture: France: Be Fluent in French Life and Culture (Speak the Culture)
• Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees
• see more

Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display

---

Rating: - Peasant France
This is a superbly written history-cum-travelogue. Robb is known for his books on French writers (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) but here he ventures into peasant France, riding on his bicycle to make the time for the small details of life in rural France. He writes extremely well about landscape, an the book throughout is enjoyable to read. Drawing on travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Robb accentuates the backwardness of peasant France - mainly for effect, it seems. I found this ... Read More

---

Rating: - Unification and what was lost along the way
Visiting relatives in France, I often drive down the A26 autoroute over the plain of Champagne: mile after mile of chalk plateau, with never a village or house in sight. I've often wondered how this landscape looked before motor transport, when getting from your house to work the fields involved horse-power or your own feet: was the settlement pattern denser, with hamlets and villages now swept away by the depopulation following agribusiness, or has it always been this empty? Graham Robb answered ... Read More

---

Rating: - Fascinating insight into the lost tribes of France
A Francophile with a penchant for learning about France while taking cycling holidays there, Robb has written a brilliant evocation of a lost world, when most inhabitants of France from outside the Paris region did not speak French and did not think of themselves as being French, and then an equally fascinating story of how the railway and the bicycle allowed the French state to impose "Frenchness" on the country. The book draws on evidence mostly from pre-revolutionary France, but with enough from ... Read More

---

Rating: - Fascinating. Eclectic. Readable.
This is one of the most enjoyable books i have read in recent years, written in a wonderful accessible style, it contains marvellous detail, and unusual facts about all aspects of France. This is really a first class book, and a great summer read.

---

Rating: - Discover the real France
Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic and personal passion - France. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degree in modern languages at Oxford, and has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research and revelatory fact, written in an accessible but highly literate and engaging style.

The book is quite difficult to pigeonhole. ... Read More

---