“His France—urban, northern, provincial, pedestrian, noisy, unpuritanical, festive—was in contrast to, and predicated upon, another France: bureaucratic, official, suburban, safe, rule—crazy, scared.”
— Julian Barnes
“Prophet of the past, poete maudit, Richard Cobb is a visionary. His books will take you on an extraordinary intellectual and emotional journey….Read them as you would Gogol: in search of dead souls.”
— Robert Darnton, The New York Review of Books
“Cobb was a true historian of life ‘from below’, using archival evidence to bring alive the reality—and the suffering—of ordinary people’s existence. His essays about his own life and times have the same loving attention to detail, to the texture of quotidian events, to real people and real feeling.”
— Geoffrey Wheatcroft, New Statesman
QUICK VIEW
