Böcker av Graham Robb

The perfect holiday read (pre, post or during)

Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award 1997

An authoritative history of the French nation that can be read for novelistic pleasure, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Discovery of France and Parisians.

A perceptive, vivid and sometimes startling re-evaluation of homosexuality in the Victorian era.

An astute and engrossing biography from the author of Victor Hugo and Balzac.

Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement; revolutionary playwright; poet; epic novelist; author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France; a gifted painter and architect; a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ; in short, a tantalizing personality who dominated and maddened his contemporaries.

In the first major English biography of Honore de Balzac for over fifty years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. As colorful as the world he described, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography: a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes; a passionate collector, inventor, explorer, and political campaigner; a mesmerizing storyteller with the power to make his fantasies come true. Balzac's early life was a struggle against literary disappointment and poverty, and he learned his trade by writing a series of lurid commercial novels. Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of hare-brained entrepreneurial schemes which took him to the remotest parts of Europe and into a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence. Out of these experiences emerged some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition. Skillfully interweaving the life with the novels, Robb presents Balzac as one of the great tragi-comic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and still is, immense.

Sunday Times top-ten bestselling author Graham Robb turns his attention on his homeland for the first time in this beautifully written and ground-breaking book.

Best-selling author Graham Robb finds that the 2,000-year-old map of Ptolemy unlocks a central mystery of British history.

"Published 2013 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan ... under the title The ancient paths: discovering the lost map of Celtic Europe"--Title page verso.

Graham Robb's The Ancient Paths will change the way you see European civilization.Inspired by a chance discovery, Robb became fascinated with the world of the Celts: their gods, their art, and, most of all, their sophisticated knowledge of science. His investigations gradually revealed something extraordinary: a lost map, of an empire constructed with precision and beauty across vast tracts of Europe. The map had been forgotten for almost two millennia and its implications were astonishing.Minutely researched and rich in revelations, The Ancient Paths brings to life centuries of our distant history and reinterprets pre-Roman Europe. Told with all of Robb's grace and verve, it is a dazzling, unforgettable book.

No one knows a city like the people who live there - so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb's Parisians is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return to again and again - rather like the city itself, in fact.For this collection of true stories the City of Paris awarded Graham the Medal of the City of Paris. 'Quirky, amused and tres British' Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending.

Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on early 20th-century culture. This new work by the biographer of Balzac and Victor Hugo now brings the "haunting and haunted poet" ("New York Times Book Review") vividly to life. of illustrations.

Based on the observation that the French poet Mallarme repeatedly used the 100 or so words in the French language that have no rhyme, this work argues that Mallarme's poems make sense as allegorical tales of their own creation.

A literary biography of the French novelist and playwright, Honore Balzac.