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.The Discovery of France

by: Graham Robb

July 04, 2008
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 this for me in this splendid study of the making of modern France: it always was this empty, to the extent that in early cartographic surveys of the country the attempt to find landmarks on this featureless plain led even to particularly conspicuous ... Read More:
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.The Discovery of France

by: Graham Robb

September 07, 2007
"On the eve of the French Revolution, France was three weeks long ... and three weeks wide ... Journey times had barely changed since the days of the Romans."

Think you know France? Think again! Robb's argument is that "France was, in effect, a vast continent that had yet to be fully colonized." By turning his back on "the usual cast list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history", he seeks out the daily lives of "the faceless millions" and their attitudes to the France in which they supposedly lived. This is not a history of the French regions. Rather it is a history of how those regions culturally coalesced into the centralist state that is the France of today, "the celebration of home-grown diversity and the supreme importance ... Read More:
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.Rimbaud

by: Graham Robb

September 07, 2001
It is difficult to imagine a better biography: informed, objective and superbly written. Rimbaud - in all his incarnations, from the rebellious student 'loping' accross to the library in Charleroi leaving clouds of pipe smoke in his wake to the deliriously skeletal figure on his deathbed in Marseilles - comes off the pages as an outlandishly entrancing figure. Even if the poetry isn't to everyone's taste, the man himself is compelling.
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.Strangers: Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

by: Graham Robb

November 05, 2004
When Mister Graham Robb started his book on homosexual love in the 19th century he was suddenly faced with prejudices he never expected to learn from his friends and colleagues. People even felt pity with his family members. Dad goes gay! But not really. The way Robb handles this irritation is an eye opener and a foretaste of his analyzation on homosexuality for the rest of the book. In other words, Robb is great with chasing away dark clouds to let the sun shine in on this subject. He demonstrates it is the people's personal view on homosexuality which has hardly changed over the last ages. Only the position of homosexuals in public (debate) has improved.

A while ago I told a good friend of mine (he is a language scientist) that I would like ... Read More:
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.Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century

by: Graham Robb

November 07, 2003
When Mister Graham Robb started his book on homosexual love in the 19th century he was suddenly faced with prejudices he never expected to learn from his friends and colleagues. People even felt pity with his family members. Dad goes gay! But not really. The way Robb handles this irritation is an eye opener and a foretaste of his analyzation on homosexuality for the rest of the book. In other words, Robb is great with chasing away dark clouds to let the sun shine in on this subject. He demonstrates it is the people's personal view on homosexuality which has hardly changed over the last ages. Only the position of homosexuals in public (debate) has improved.

A while ago I told a good friend of mine (he is a language scientist) that I would like ... Read More:
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.Balzac

by: Graham Robb

September 22, 2000
One of the major accomplishments of this biography is that it will make you want to go out and read all of Balzac. This is because Mr. Robb has sprinkled a liberal number of excerpts from the novels throughout his text. Balzac was both a keen observer and a tireless researcher, with an interest in, literally, everything. He was also tremendously sensitive. When you put all of these qualities together, you get prose that has great depth....resonating between the internal and the external. Mr. Robb, though a great admirer, is quick to admit that not everything that Balzac wrote was great or even good. He was obsessive....a writing machine churning out thousands of words per day. He was deeply in debt and had to write just about non-stop in an attempt to get himself ... Read More:
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.Victor Hugo

by: Graham Robb

October 09, 1998
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.
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.The Hunchback of Notre Dame with DVD (Signet Classics)

by: Victor Hugo

September 27, 2005
The whole story seems to be a relentless flow of beautiful speech conveying words of one of the greatest stories ever written.
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.Balzac

by: Graham Robb

June 10, 1994
The whole story seems to be a relentless flow of beautiful speech conveying words of one of the greatest stories ever written.
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.Victor Hugo

by: Graham Robb

October 24, 1997
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.
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Used Price: £4.20