Why am I passionate about this?

I have long been struck, as a learner of French at school and later a university professor of French, by how much English borrows from French language and culture. Imagine English without naïveté and caprice. You might say it would lose its raison d’être My first book was the history of a single French phrase, the je-ne-sais-quoi, which names a ‘certain something’ in people or things that we struggle to explain. Working on that phrase alerted me to the role that French words, and foreign words more generally, play in English. The books on this list helped me to explore this topic—and more besides—as I was writing Émigrés.


I wrote

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

By Richard Scholar,

Book cover of Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

What is my book about?

Émigrés examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English. It asks what these words reveal about the fertile…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Marriage A-La-Mode

Richard Scholar Why did I love this book?

This is a sparklingly funny play. I love its contemporary freshness, its fleetness of foot, and its irreverence. It satirizes the fashion for all things French among London’s social climbers. It sugars the pill of all that satire by bringing a fast-paced plot to a comic ending of marriage and reconciliation. It taught me that writers in seventeenth-century England like the play’s author, John Dryden, were importing words and ideas from France as they sought to trace a middle way between a servile mimicry of French culture and an insular rejection of it. 

By John Dryden,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marriage A-La-Mode as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Dryden's audiences in 1671, both aristocratic and middle-class, would have been quick to respond to the themes of disputed royal succession, Francophilia and loyalty among subjects in his most successful tragicomedy. In the tragic plot, written in verse, young Leonidas has to struggle to assert his place as the rightful heir to the throne of Sicily and to the hand of the usurper's daughter. In the comic plot, written in prose, two fashionable couples (much more at home in London drawing-rooms than at the Sicilian court) play at switching partners in the 'modern' style. The introduction of this edition argues…


Book cover of The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour

Richard Scholar Why did I love this book?

This is cultural history with a difference and of a difference. It teaches you a lot about the reputation for fashionable culture that France enjoyed for centuries all over the world and continues to enjoy to this day. How much of all that is already packed into the book’s subtitle! The rest of the book is just as accessible and lively and unwilling ever to take itself too seriously. 

By Joan DeJean,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Essence of Style as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What makes fashionistas willing to pay a small fortune for a particular designer accessory? Why does a special occasion only become really special when a champagne cork pops? Why are diamonds the status symbol gemstone, instantly signifying wealth, power, and even emotional commitment? Writing with great elan, one of the foremost authorities on seventeenth-century French culture provides the answer to these and other fascinating questions in her account of how, at one glittering moment in history, the French under Louis XIV set the standards of sophistication, style, and glamour that still rule our lives today. Joan DeJean takes us back…


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Book cover of Medical Hostages

Medical Hostages By Shawn Jennings,

Duke, the leader of a bike gang, is in custody for murder. He plans an escape by feigning illness and hospitalization. But an unexpected turn of events results in two gang members and Duke holding a medical floor of patients hostage. Patients will die if the police don't meet their…

Book cover of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Richard Scholar Why did I love this book?

This is a brilliant essay in literary criticism. It traces English ambivalence towards French language and culture in the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest. It does so by delving into major literary texts—by Chaucer and Shakespeare among others—that explore that ambivalence for what it is: the symptom of a fetish. I like the way Williams writes and I find her inspiring in her desire to remain faithful to the complexity of the texts she studies and their attitudes.

By Deanne Williams,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What was the impact of the Norman Conquest on the culture of medieval and early modern England? Deanne Williams answers this question by contending that not only French language and literature, but the idea of Frenchness itself, produced England's literary and cultural identity. Examining a variety of English representations of, and responses to, France and 'the French' in the work of Chaucer, Caxton, Skelton, Shakespeare and others, this book shows how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the pervasive presence of French language and culture in England that was the legacy of the Norman…


Book cover of Ennui

Richard Scholar Why did I love this book?

Ennui is a hidden gem of a novel. I admire the way it deftly weaves together personal lives and political histories on either side of the Irish Sea. I have come to feel strongly that the author, Maria Edgeworth, is unjustly overlooked by literary history in favour of Jane Austen. Yet Austen drew inspiration from her older contemporary. In this novel, Edgeworth draws on French words and ideas to tell the tale of an over-entitled English lounge lizard who is cured of his fashionable affliction—the ennui of the title—by his travels and travails in Ireland. The result is a cosmopolitan novel crackling with invention and implication.

By Maria Edgeworth,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ennui as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ennui


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Book cover of Victoria Unveiled

Victoria Unveiled By Shane Joseph,

A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will…

Book cover of The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Richard Scholar Why did I love this book?

This is a bittersweet comedy of manners in which John le Carré ventures way beyond the spy novels for which he is more famous. For lovers of spy novelsand I am one suchthere is much here to savour. Le Carré draws upon the French concept of the naïve – as paired with the sentimental by the German essayist Friedrich Schillerto inform and enliven the telling of a tale about a love triangle in middle England. Underlying the comic idiom of the novel is an acid dissection of the causes of British failure to be a part of Europe and to help lead Europe out of her darkness. A tale, perhaps, for our times. 

By John le Carré,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Naïve and Sentimental Lover as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston.

"I have visited bohemia and got away unscathed."

Aldo Cassidy is an entrepreneurial genius. At thirty-nine, he dominates the baby pram market and rewards his success with a custom Bentley. But Aldo's bourgeois life is upended by a chance encounter with Shamus-a charismatic writer whose first and only novel blazoned across the firmament twenty years earlier. The two develop a passionate friendship that draws Aldo-smitten also with his new…


Explore my book 😀

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

By Richard Scholar,

Book cover of Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

What is my book about?

Émigrés examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English. It asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.

The book demonstrates that French borrowings—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice—have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. It invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and asks why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

Book cover of Marriage A-La-Mode
Book cover of The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
Book cover of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare

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