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“... Fred Vargas is a woman. Said to be the sixth best-selling author in France, she is unusual there in being a female crime writer, in contrast with women’s dominance of the genre in Britain. Vargas also writes like a woman, if that implies an interest in character, feeling and motive, rather than ‘brutality and eroticism’ (Queneau’s description of the polar – a contraction of policier – a genre inspired by the Série noire’s postwar translations of American crime novels ...”

“... chapter on ‘society’ in the widest sense, the ensemble des ensembles – neatly translated by Sian Reynolds as the ‘set of sets’ – which discusses the influence on the economy of the social hierarchy, politics and culture. Taken by itself, the analysis offered in Braudel’s second volume appears too static, and its readers should be aware that ...”

“... it reapppeared in French in 1989, four years after his death, as Le Modèle italien. Siân Reynolds translated it into English in 1991 as Out of Italy, a version that has now been reissued. In it, Braudel applies his method to a period which might otherwise be understood as a mere two hundred years of ‘surface disturbances’. The Italian Renaissance ...”

“... This is the second collection of essays by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to appear in English. The first was called The Territory of the Historian and up to a point justified its title by describing a landscape of historical investigation – rural France peopled by a peasantry engaged in earning a living and undergoing birth, disease and death, the whole benignly directed by techniques of quantification ...”

“... Shortly before his death, I talked to Braudel about the motives that lay behind his final book, The Identity of France. He had made his reputation as a universal historian, with a global curiosity. Why should he seek to crown his achievement in such a parochial fashion, proclaiming that it was France, after all, that he really loved? ‘I am a Frenchman, just like any other,’ he said ...”

“... In​ 1974, aged 71, having announced the end of a writing career that had produced nearly two hundred novels, and having retreated from a mansion with 11 servants to a small house in Lausanne where he lived with his second wife’s ex-maid, Georges Simenon dictated his Letter to My Mother, Henriette Simenon née Brüll, who had died four years earlier ...”

“... WOMEN! Are you dull, plain, boring, approaching forty, with no talents or interests in particular and no idea whatsoever what to do next? Do you ‘inspire a slight revulsion in people’ to the point that everybody ignores you, probably because you’re so ‘ill at ease’ in yourself? You might do worse than get into the surveillance industry, Virginie Despentes suggests in Apocalypse Baby, spying on the unhappy teenage children of rich Parisians ...”

“... studies into an integrated narrative history of his country. Perhaps incredulous of such ambition, Sian Reynolds has taken the liberty of suppressing the full extent of it in her graceful English translation.What were the aims of this vast design? Braudel’s previous themes were virtually invented by him – strikingly original quarries from the past ...”

“... Whiteside and Schwartz, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward, Howard Curtis, William Hobson, Sian Reynolds, David Watson – but, or and, one of the remarkable features of the project is how consistent the tone is across the books. When you look at the range of tones and voices in the same publisher’s multi-translator edition of Proust, it’s ...”