Books : History : Countries & Regions : Europe : France : General AAS

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Books : History : Countries & Regions : Europe : France : General AAS

• The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848

  E.J. Hobsbawm

  
  
   

• The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

  William Doyle

  
  
   

• Contemporary France: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society

  Jill Forbes, Nicholas Hewlett, Francois Nectoux

  
  
   

• Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford World's Classics)

  Edmund Burke

  
  
   

• Michelin Historical Map 102: : Battle of Normandy (Michelin Historical Maps)

  Michelin Travel Publications

  
  
   

• France Since 1945

  Robert Gildea

  
  
   

• Major and Mrs.Holt's Battlefield Guide to Normandy Landing Beaches (Major & Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guide)

  Tonie Holt, Valmai Holt

  
  
   

• Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries

  Mary G. Houston

  
  
   

• The French Revolution

  Christopher Hibbert

  
  
   

• Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984 v. 3 (Essential Works of Foucault 3)

  Michel Foucault

  
  
   

• The Cambridge Illustrated History of France (Cambridge Illustrated Histories) (Cambridge Illustrated Histories)

  Colin Jones

  
  
   

• Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and Society (Hodder Arnold Publication)

  David Howarth, Georgios Varouxakis

  
  
   

• The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays

  Robert Darnton

  
  
   

• The History of the Franks (Classics)

  Saint,Bishop of Tours Gregory

  
  
   

• Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324

  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

  
  
   

• The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290-1329

  Rene Weis

  
  
   

• Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Modern Classics)

  George Orwell

  
  
   

• Wine and War: The French, the Nazis and France's Greatest Treasure

  Donald & Petie Kladstrup

  
  
   

• The Basque History of the World

  Mark Kurlansky

  
  After basking in the shallows of success that surrounded Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky turns his attentions to the people who first hunted it and in doing so may have discovered America before John Cabot could say Isparsortalderatu. In a sense The Basque History of the World is the natural successor to Cod, for it grows organically from that book's early chapters. It unfolds the dramatic tale of the Basques as they fight off the challenges of the Vikings, the Romans, the Muslims and, for centuries now, the Spanish; proudly defensive of the remote and rugged hills on the edge of the Pyrenees, where Shakespeare set Love's Labour's Lost and that echoes with their peculiar agglutinating tongue. They are possibly Europe's aborigines and their language, unlike any other, was reputed to originate from, variously, the Tower of Babel, Atlantis and even the Garden of Eden. What's for certain is that it has defined their being when all else has been taken from them and that today, emerging from the shadow of the Franco regime's persecution, Europe's oldest nation wants to be its newest state. Kurlansky's recipe is reassuringly and familiarly unorthodox: intermingled with a stirring narrative are maps, photographs, pieces of reportage, quirky facts and, of course, recipes--the Basques are justly proud of their fish--and bean-based cuisine, something Kurlansky is not slow to savour. Where Cod was not simply about a big fish in The Big Pond but embraced the thorny problem of global over-fishing, The Basque History of the World does not confine its scope to the two and a half million people living in the seven Basque provinces. It speaks of violently modern and pervasive issues such as the notion of nationhood, borders and identity, and does so in a slyly humorous yet always passionate way. Be warned: This is not insipid, literary chloroform. What the imperious Kurlansky has written is a magnificently personal and driven tribute to a people and culture that have spellbound him for years and will warm the cockles of your heart (before adding them to a Ttoro stew). --David Vincent
  
   

• Signs of the Heart: Love and Death in Languedoc

  Christopher Hope

  
  The inveterate popularity of this genre lies in mythologising the Mediterranean idyll as a world where stressed-out urbanites can lose their cares in lazy days and red wine. Like other role-models of its type, "Kissac"--Christopher Hope's home of six years--is peopled by the larger-than-life: a pathological collector of clocks and bones, a woman who believes in her own divinity, an alcoholic donkey.

  Where this book transcends the genre, though, is in the playful subversion of the myth. Kissac is filled with immigrants all living the good life. Yet an air of dissatisfaction pervades their idyll, most apparently of all in the story of the British painter who subsists by selling melancholy ex-pats her body and Horlicks-- rekindling those memories of home that all exiles try to erase.

  Hope is a sensitive and witty writer whose sentences betray an interest in the emotions above all else. His subtly expressed disdain for our age, with its scientific certainties and slow betrayal of the feelings, saturates these memorable stories of love and death, and the curious symbiosis between the two:

  "God is officially dead, and life is run from California. But then I don't care about these things. I care about signs from the heart."

  --Toby Green