Böcker av David Lawday

In this life of the master diplomat, David Lawday follows Talleyrand's remarkable career through the most turbulent age Europe has known and explores - for the first time - in intimate detail his extraordinarily perverse relationship with Napoleon.

In the sweltering Indian summer of 1870, a young Englishman is sent to Paris as Prussian invaders advance on the French capital with the largest siege army ever assembled. The City of Light is cut off from the outside world, the population trapped behind its tall ramparts. As the siege continues for a month, then a second, a hungering third, a frozen fourth and into a starved fifth, the Englishman, a stock young gentleman of his Victorian times, falls in love with a radical French enchantress who by chance saves his hide. The lovers' fate is entwined with those of a tormented French general appointed to defend Paris and an impatient Prussian grandee (Otto von Bismarck) hell-bent on bringing the 'capital of civilisation' to its knees. The unlikely love story turns upon true events that have shaken our world through to the present. Praise for David Lawday's recent book Danton: Giant of the French Revolution: "Spirited and highly readable... Lawday creates some great set pieces and striking turning points... He is able to capture the atmosphere of the early revolution: its inflammable mix of devilment and righteousness, reckless selflessness and flagrant self-promotion. He sees that Danton was more than the sum of his crimes, the sum of his secrets; he celebrates his 'large heart and violent impulses in an irresolvable conflict'." Hilary Mantel, The London Review of Books.

The France Alphabet is a wry, informative handbook for the discerning international traveller on how to handle the French. It offers essential A-Z insights into France and its ways through a snap alphabetic look at characters, traditions and historical events that together get to the essence of who the French are. France's best known writers and thinkers over the centuries come under the handbook's microscope with a light, challenging touch, as do world figures like Napoleon and Joan of Arc as well as France's role in high fashion, sex and the art of staying slim. For newcomers to France, indeed also for those already acquainted with its ways, The France Alphabet gives fresh insider counsel on how to discuss these things, some extremely touchy, when in French company. Each A-Z feature, from A is for Art, through R is for Revolution to Z is for Zola is the selection of English author David Lawday, who has long made France his home and has a French wife. Each one - with a brisk commentary and matching cartoon - epitomizes what it is that helps make the French the way they are.