Graham Robb

A narrative of exploration full of strange landscapes and even stranger inhabitants that explains the enduring fascination of France. While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages.The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France past and present remains to be discovered. A New York Times Notable Book, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Slate Best Book, and Booklist Editor's Choice."

A fresh examination of the development of homosexual culture during the nineteenth century in Europe and America describes the lives of gay men and women, how they discovered their sexuality, how they made contact with like-minded people, the relationship of gay culture to religion, and how homosexuals were treated by society. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

In Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, award-winning author Graham Robb explores the story – and history – of male and female homosexuality in the UK and US, uncovering elements from legislature, literature, medicine and day-to-day life that point to a particularly self-aware and sophisticated culture of Victorian homosexuality. Drawing on famous cases such as the Wilde trials, as well as a wide variety of previously neglected sources, Robb recreates this era with great insight, humour and aplomb, exploding modern myths and restoring the real and vibrant truth of homosexual love to today’s readers: Strangers tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising – a story of oppression and secrecy, but also of unexpected tolerance and familiarity.

Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, and the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his published poems. But his posthumous career is even more astonishing: saint to symbolists and surrealists; poster child for anarchy and drug use; gay pioneer; a major influence on artists from Picasso to Bob Dylan.

Graham Robb's brilliant biography moves Rimbaud on from his perpetual adolescence where our imaginations have held him to show the extent of his transformations. From phenomenally precocious schoolboy he became Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet, author of poems that range from the exquisite to the obscene. But this brief, five-year period as the enfant-terrible of French literature is only one small side of Rimbaud's story. Robb takes us on a biographical journey through three continents and many different identities. Rimbaud emerges from this stunning work of biographical scholarship and historical imagination as an even more complex, ambiguous and fascinating figure than ever before.

Graham Robb has produced a masterpiece literary biography in which Balzac bursts into life on every page. The living manifestation of the colourful and varied world he described, yet at the same time its most astonishing exception, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography. Robb skilfully interweaves the life with the work to paint an indelible and brilliantly compelling portrait of one of the great tragicomic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been and is still immense.

Almost a century after the death of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, readers still puzzle over his writings, still seek to understand his seemingly impenetrable philosophy. In this highly original book, Graham Robb reveals conclusive answers to the mysteries of Mallarmé. Robb's discovery of a "key" to Mallarmé's poetry is an exciting achievement that entirely redefines Mallarmé studies, illuminates large areas of French poetry, both before and after Mallarmé, and opens the way for new interpretations of some of the most complicated poems ever written.As Robb scrutinized the work of Mallarmé, he discovered that the poet repeatedly used the hundred or so words in the French language that have no rhyme. This discovery, as Robb tells it, "proved to be the first step of a staircase leading to a tomb which had remained sealed since Mallarmé built it." It revealed the only perspective from which his poems "made sense"—as allegorical tales of their own creation. The "theme" of the poem turns out to be just one surface of a brilliantly coordinated whole. In the first part of the book, Robb defines and explores the development of Mallarmé's approach; in the second he applies the method to specific poems; in the conclusion he suggests ways in which the key might be applied to other poems and poets; and in the epilogue he offers a guided tour through Mallarmé's famously uninterpretable shipwreck poem, Un coup de dés. The book reveals how Mallarmé's self-reflecting, self-destructive work poses, and perhaps answers, the central questions of twentieth-century criticism.

Honore de Balzac was one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived, and now at last he has a biography that tells his story in a way Balzac himself would have loved with all the ambiguities, the flaws, the illusions and myths, the realities of street and salon, the loves and affairs, and above all the imperishable stories that still have the power to make us laugh out loud in one minute and weep in the next. Robb has given us a splendid tale, meticulously researched, lovingly put together, and beautifully told. Those who know Balzac will not be able to put his book down; those who don t know him will rush from this biography to the literary treasures created by the writer Robb describes for us in prose that does justice to its subject. Richard Marius, author of Thomas More: A Biography