I am a historian with wide-ranging interests and publications, including, in European history, histories of Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Mediterranean, eighteenth-century Europe, Europe 1550-1800, Europe since 1945, and European warfare.
By Jeremy Black
This is an accessible, up-to-date, illustrated history of France and the French that captures the absence of any inevitable pattern of development, and also the interactions of the geography of France with political circumstances. While taking an essentially chronological approach, there is an engagement with important continuities. A helpful guide to understanding France today.
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By Robert Gildea
The leading British interpreter of French history from 1940 produced this valuable guide to a period of major transformation in French history. Gildea has cogently argued that French politics reflects long-lasting divisions that play out in different mileux.
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By Colin Jones
No history of France can be complete without Paris, and this is the best account of that city, told adroitly by a specialist who conveys his enthusiasm well. Jones successfully presents Paris both as a unit and as a context for a range of identities and experiences.
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By William Doyle
Bill Doyle is the leading British interpreter of the French Revolution and this is a subtle account of its causes and course. Very good on the need to look for specific political causes rather than any supposedly inevitable pattern of socio-economic conflict.
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By Ian Wood
The best point of departure for our understanding of medieval France, and a skillful build on often fragmentary sources. Wood shows how ‘barbarian’ invaders meshed with elements of Romanitas in order to produce continuities, notably in Christianity, as well as a very different society of rulership.
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By Robert Knecht
A scholarly account of the family that ruled France from 1328 to 1589. Knecht concentrates on the high politics, but his book is a valuable linkage of the Middle Ages and the early-modern age, taking readers from the Hundred Years’ War to the French Wars of Religion. France’s bloody history emerges clearly.
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