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. 'Quirky, amused and tres British' Julian Barnes 'A collection of true stories, culled from Robb's insatiable historical reading and lit by his imagination ...So richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room' John Carey, Book of the Week, Sunday Times 'This book is the sort of triumph that we have no right to expect to come from anyone in the steady way that Robb's masterly books come from him' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph 'As Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water' New York Times

About the Author

Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His most recent book, The Discovery of France, won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes in 2008. He lives in Cumbria.

Reviews

This audiobook version of Graham Robb's volume of strange-but-true Parisian narratives offers listeners a fascinating history that is frequently encumbered by heavy-handed, often overblown narration from Simon Vance. Robb offers a series of bizarre tales that touch on everything from the first sexual experience of Napoleon Bonaparte to the creation of the Catacombes de Paris, but Vance narrates as if all of Parisian history is weighing on him: his reading is too grand, overly inflated, and pompous, his French accent frequently fails to ring true, and it simply sounds as if he is trying too hard to narrate what should have been an intriguing and charming audiobook. A Norton hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 1). (May) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

Graham Robb's new book is so richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room. Essentially it is a collection of true stories, culled from Robb's insatiable historical reading and lit by his imagination. He has the passion of a naturalist displaying a wall of rare butterflies or a cabinet of exotic corals, but his specimens are all human and walked the streets of Paris at some point between the French revolution and now...[A] generous and humane book.--John Carey ""Book of the Week" "