In discussing the Cathars, he describes maps that feature a particular tree, then shows all the guidebooks and maps from the 16th century on featuring that tree. This book is not merely an episodic puff piece about the pretty objects and culture richness that were created on French soil. Rather, it tries to get at the deeper history--positive and negative--that can be uncovered from sources (which are often limited), one adventure at a time.

So, anyone looking for a survey of French history will be disappointed, but someone wishing to know how Caesar would approach the northern Gaul warriors or Michel Frédérick lost the Tour de France will find exquisite essays.The book is divided into key periods in French history as a starting point with intersections of Robb's adventures in that part of the region. ambitious and original' - The Times_____Original, knowledgeable and endlessly entertaining, France: An Adventure History is an unforgettable journey through France from the first century BC to the present day. It was as if he purposefully tried explaining a painting with words, but without the benefit of a single temporal frame of reference, nor even, a contextial groundwork. A stunningly illustrated history of Venice, from its beginnings as 'La Serenissima' - 'the Most Serene Republic' - to the Italian city that continues to enchant visitors today.

Over the course of her first year, she is welcomed into the rhythms and routines that characterise life at the edge of the world. For a great read, I would make one critique: I would have liked to have read a bit more about French cultural history. As such the author’s chapters each read like a sort of cocktail mixing the present and the past, with the past providing a piquancy that penetrates a smooth, blanketing present. I have realised, halfway through it, that I should have read a convential history on France before I picked Robb's up.The author discusses the Cathers, describes maps featuring a particular tree, then follows a 1552 guidebook by Charles Estienne.

This is an unconventional but fascinating and illuminating approach to telling the story of the French people, and well worth the effort. For example, I didn’t know how isolated and independent parts of France were in centuries past, to the point that they had unique languages that were barely connected with French. I learned new facts that I had not known -- such as it was women who led the French Revolution and learned about architecture, trees, and round-abouts and bicycle routes!He talks about why the southeast is more violent than other parts of the country; how anti-clericalism existed long before, and after, the Revolution; and why the country’s obsession with Paris’s predominance from the 12th century to the present was in part the result of how much writing about France --- literary, historiographical, legal --- emanated from the City of Light. Along the way, readers will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history – Louis XIV, the French Revolution, the French Résistance, the Tour de France – but all presented in a shining new light.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Graham Robb bicycles through France, stopping in places and diving into a historical event that happened here.

He connects the land to its history in a way that made me want to fly to France and see if I could follow his trail. Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. In addition to the language, we began to appreciate the culture, but France’s history wasn’t in our study plans.