Product Description

Liberation in Paris was greeted with joy and marked by recriminations and the trauma of purges. The feverish intellectual arguments of the young took place amidst the mundane reality of hunger and fuel shortages. This book is a historical account of one of the stimulating periods in twentieth century French history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6467 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Features

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• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
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Review
Outstanding, enormously enjoyable, exciting (Philip Ziegler Daily Telegraph )

Held me gripped by every page and I was impatient at any interruption. Spellbinding, often frightening and sometimes funny (Alec Guinness Daily Mail )

About the Author
Antony Beevor began his career as a professional officer in the 11th Hussars. He is the author of several books, including The Spanish Civil War, Crete and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation, but he is best known for his books Berlin and Stalingrad, the international No 1 bestseller, and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, Wolfson Price and Hawthornden Prize. He lives in London and Kent. Artemis Cooper is the author of several books, including Cairo in the War 1939-1945 and Writing at the Kitchen Table. Her grandfather, Duff Cooper, was the first post-war British ambassador to Paris, and his private diaries and papers provide one of the unpublished sources for this book.

Customer Reviews

Post-war Paris in a nutshell
This well written book provides a highly amusing portrait of Paris after the war. It covers politics, literature and the night life. Sartre and all the rest of the crew. It explains why the communists are still a force in politics now and reveals a shrewd understanding of the French psyche.

It is certainly worth buying. Up in the same league as Beevor's book on Stalingrad.

The best I've ever read on this subject
Readers of history books have come to expect nothing but the best from Anthony Beevor and this is no exception. The superb pairing of Beevor with Artemis Cooper has produced an excellent account (certainly the best I've read) on France during and after the Liberation.

Cooper (a descendent of Duff Cooper, the first post-war ambassador to France) provides a massive contribution to the text with the diaries and letters of Duff and Diana Cooper which inspires a wholly original and unique insight to the politics at the time.
This, added to the exceptionally accessible style of Beevor, makes a thoroughly enjoyable, as well as informative read.

The only criticism I can think of is the occasional niggling feeling at the end of the odd paragraph that the story that has just been recounted was not quite finished. This is certainly not a common occurrence and does not at all detract from the main body of the narrative.

The book covers many aspects of life after the Libreation in Paris - not just political, it also focuses a great deal on the lives of intellectuals and artists - and also gives an idea as to the suffering of France generally in those hard years.

In conclusion I must recommend this book to anyone with even the vaguest interest in French social history.

Le "Tout Paris" but very few ordinary Parisians
This book is really about the experiences of Paris's upper-class "gratin" and the friends and associates of Mr Beevor's wife's father, the British diplomat Duff Cooper. It becomes almost parodic in its descriptions of dinners and distressed gentlefolk, and as such is very different from Mr Beevor's previous books on Stalingrad and Berlin, which were made from the memories of people from all levels of society. It's like reading a history of London during the war written by Harold Nicholson. Elegantly written and interesting, but most definitely not a history of Paris.