The French- orderly and anarchic, serious and frivolous, charming and infuriating, rational and mystical, pessimistic, pleasure-loving - and perhaps more than any other people, intellectual. From philosophers to Asterix, this original and entertaining book shows just exactly what makes the French so . . . French.
Sudhir Hazareesingh was born in Mauritius. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, since 1990. He has written extensively about French intellectual and cultural history; among his books are The Legend of Napoleon, In the Shadow of the General and How the French Think. He won the Prix du Memorial d'Ajaccio and the Prix de la Fondation Napoleon for the first of these, a Prix d'Histoire du Senat for the second, and the Grand Prix du Livre d'Idees for the third. In 2020, he became a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (G.C.S.K.), the highest distinction in the Mauritian honours system.
There could be no wiser or more witty guide to the problems of
France today.
*Times Literary Supplement*
A first-rate book... Sudhir Hazareesingh, brings an engaging
personal angle to his ambitious cavalcade through four centuries of
French intellectual thought... This vast, opinionated and wholly
original book reminds us that ideas still count and that
intellectual endeavour still has resonance in the face of the
mercantile plutocracy that so much defines the way we live now.
*New Statesman*
This book depicts Parisian society like a Cambridge party in which
everyone knows the jokes, and everyone knows where the bodies are
buried. You will read it not just with fascination, but with
relish.
*Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year)*
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