If you’re as curious as I was, you might be tempted to Google Duff Cooper, whom you’ll find described by London’s Telegraph as “a legendary womanizer” whose “many…early liaisons left his wife in tears but as his health failed, she accepted them. This thoroughly revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text surveys the cultural, social and political history of France from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune through to Emmanuel Macron's presidency. Some French book recommendation lists are city specific such as the best books on Paris, some based on the country of France and some on topics such as French cooking.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. Although every European nation has been adjusting to the dramatic transformations on the continent since the end of the Cold War, France's struggle to adapt has been .

Now in paperback, a major history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.

The tragedy of the Occupation is dealt with from the heart, as Norwich was often a witness, after the war, to the presentation by his father of the King's Medal for Courage to members of the Resistance - the few who survived.

There has also been a hardening of opinion on the extreme right, where the republic is deemed a failure and too weak to survive its current enemies. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. Part two examines the meaning and challenge of the Enlightenment, with particular reference to women and the mass of the . This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive study of French history available ranging from the early middle ages to the present. When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice.

The second Viscount Norwich or the late John Julius Cooper if you prefer, wrote and finished his final book, not long before he died. For his final book, the late Norwich tackled the dauntingly vast subject of two millennia of French history with admirable lightness and urbanity . The Belle Epoque combined a preoccupation with the noblesse of the old regime with the seeds for modernism, says Oxford history professor Ruth Harris, author of an award-winning book on the Dreyfus affair. Not that the general's pie earns him an easy ride; Norwich is still prepared to admit that, on a larger stage, "The folly and pettiness of de Gaulle pass belief". One of our greatest contemporary historians has deftly crafted a comprehensive yet concise portrait of the country’s historical sweep.In 1993, he was appointed CVO for having curated an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum to mark the 40th anniversary of the Queen's accession to the throne. This book examines the connections between the British Empire and French colonialism in war, peace and the various stages of competitive cooperation between, in which the two empires were often frères ennemis. Although I am a longtime resident of Paris, this was the first time I began to understand the full meaning of the slogan “ Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.