Kirjahaku

George-Jacques Danton was the driving force behind the French Revolution, which brought an end to an absolute monarchy that had ruled for nearly one thousand years. In The Giant of The French Revolution, David Lawday reveals the larger-than-life figure who joined the fray at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 at twenty-nine--and was dead five years later. Danton's impassioned speeches drove reformers to action and kept the Revolution alive at the moment when it risked collapse. But he lost his grip against Robespierre's Reign of Terror, becoming another of its victims under the guillotine. In vivid, novelistic prose worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy, Lawday leads us from Danton's humble roots to the streets of Paris, where this political legend acted on the operatic stage of the Revolution that altered Western civilization.

In this life of the master diplomat, David Lawday follows Talleyrand's remarkable career through the most turbulent age Europe has known and explores - for the first time - in intimate detail his extraordinarily perverse relationship with Napoleon.

The France Alphabet is a wry, informative handbook for the discerning international traveller on how to handle the French. It offers essential A-Z insights into France and its ways through a snap alphabetic look at characters, traditions and historical events that together get to the essence of who the French are. France's best known writers and thinkers over the centuries come under the handbook's microscope with a light, challenging touch, as do world figures like Napoleon and Joan of Arc as well as France's role in high fashion, sex and the art of staying slim. For newcomers to France, indeed also for those already acquainted with its ways, The France Alphabet gives fresh insider counsel on how to discuss these things, some extremely touchy, when in French company. Each A-Z feature, from A is for Art, through R is for Revolution to Z is for Zola is the selection of English author David Lawday, who has long made France his home and has a French wife. Each one - with a brisk commentary and matching cartoon - epitomizes what it is that helps make the French the way they are.