Read Conor Cruise O’Brien on Edmund Burke
Archives for posts with tag: France
I have recently finished reading The French: Portrait of a People, published in 1969 by Sanche de Gramont, a French aristocrat who worked in USA as newspaper reporter.
About ten years later, the author rearranged the letters in his surname into an anagram, Ted Morgan, and legally changed his name to that; took out American citizenship, and published a string of best-selling biographies.
The book is fun, because — although the author knows France very well — he doesn’t much admire it. Most histories of France are uncritical, or even partial: they smooth over contradictions instead of explaining them. Not so this book — I have finally gotten some candid explanations about France and the French, and I like that. I had lived in France, and many of the things I had observed did not square with commonplaces.
The writing is exceptionally fast-moving and gripping — must be on account of the author’s ten years as a reporter. This is an important quality for a book that is 470 pages long.
Austin Burbridge
Austin Burbridge lives and works in Los Angeles California
