Paris and Elsewhere

Richard Cobb, Professor of Modern History at Oxford and one of the great historians of the French Revolution, was a passionate Francophile from his first visit to France as a teenager. But the France Cobb loved was a very different place from the country one usually hears about. Allergic to the grand pretensions of the nation's politicians and technocrats, Cobb cherished everything that was offhand, improvisatory, hedonistic, and street-smart about French life. He was a connoisseur of the big city market and the crooked backstreet, of divy bars and cheap hotels, familiar with the quays of Paris and the docks of Le Havre and Marseille. He was also a brilliant reader of life and literature and a remarkable stylist in his own right. Paris and Elsewhere gathers portraits from memory, pictures of favorite haunts, and appreciations of admired artists such as Simenon and Queneau, Rene Clair and Brassai, together with Cobb's famous polemic "The Assassination of Paris," revealing a France unglimpsed by tourists. Book jacket.

Richard Cobb (1917-1996) fell in love with France when he first visited in 1935. He went on to write many works of history—some in French, some in English—about the French Revolution and occupied France.