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Patrick French brings one of the globe's most dynamic nations springing to life. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country, sensitivity to its subtler nuances and a wealth of research.
Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers. Patrick French's award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the 'damned rum name', who singlehandedly led the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, discovered a new route from China to India, organized the first expeditions up Mount Everest and attempted to start a new world religion. Following in Younghusband's footsteps, from Calcutta to the snows of the Himalayas, French pieces together the story of a man who embodies all the romance and folly of Britain's lost imperial dream.
NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND LUCAS HEDGES A tragedy of manners from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers 'My favourite book of his yet' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette 'Pure joy' Mail on Sunday 'Buoyantly insane' New Yorker Frances Price is in dire straits. Scandals swirl around the recently widowed New York socialite, and her adult-aged, toddler-brained son Malcolm is no help. Cutting their losses, they grab their cat, Small Frank, and head for the exit. Paris becomes the backdrop for a giddy drive to self-destruction, helped along by a cast of singularly curious characters. Brimming with pathos, warmth and wit, French Exit is a riotous send-up of high society and a moving story of mothers and sons.
In 1982, while he was still a schoolboy, Patrick French met the Dalai Lama for the first time. Ever since, he has been fascinated by Tibet's people, its history, and its recent plight. For centuries, Tibet has occupied a unique place in the Western imagination: romantic, mysterious, a remote mountain kingdom of incarnate lamas and nomadic herdsmen, of gold-roofed monasteries and hidden valleys which hold the secret of eternal youth. In recent years, Tibet has acquired an additional resonance as the oppressed vassal of its mighty neighbour China. Its plight has attracted Hollywood stars, and the exiled Dalai Lama has become the global embodiment of spiritual attainment and unflagging commitme...
V.S. Naipaul is the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and non-fiction, his is a gift born of a forceful, visionary impulse. With great feeling for his formidable body of work, and exclusive access to his private papers and personal recollections, Patrick French has produced a luminous and astonishing account of this enigmatic genius. V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, into an Indian family. French examines early privations, Naipaul’s life within a displaced community and his talent and fierce ambition at school, which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. He describes how, once in England, homesickn...
In over forty years of travel in France I have found my views shared by all who have a true vocation in the world of cheese. With their love and understanding of the land and the animals which provide milk for their cheeses, the makers of farmhouse cheese are the best guardians and restorers of the natural unpolluted countryside. Their products offer the richness and limitless variety of unspoilt local and seasonal flavour and aroma. They raise cheese above the level of an all-year-round, standardised, utilitarian factory food. Their cheese is a gourmet's heaven of everbeckoning delights. May this book lead you on to them... Patrick Rance
'A fine, lucid book . . . vividly drawn with novel-like touches' Hanif Kureshi At midnight on 14 August 1947, Britain's 350-year-old Indian Empire was broken into three pieces. The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, and Britain's role as an imperial power came to an end. Patrick French's vivid and surprising account of the chaotic final years of colonial rule in India has been acclaimed as the definitive book on this subject. Journeying across India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, he brings to life a cast of characters including spies, idealists, freedom fighters and politicians from Churchill to Gandhi. The result is a compelling story of deal-making, missed opportunities, hope and tragedy. 'Extraordinarily able and nuanced . . . a brilliant book on an important subject . . . French is the most impressive Western historian of modern India currently at work' HERALD 'Beautifully written' SUNDAY TIMES 'French is a natural storyteller . . . a delightful tale of intrigue, ham-handedness and just plain blundering' INDIA TODAY
The Tel Quel Readerpresents for the first time in English many of the key essays that played an instrumental role in shaping the contours of literary and cultural debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Tel Quelwas a French journal and publishing team that printed some of the earliest work by Derrida, Bataille, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault and Deleuze. From its beginning in 1960 to its closure in 1982, TQpublished some of the key essays of major poststructuralist thinkers. The Readerincludes essays available in English for the first time by Kristeva and Foucault, and a fascinating interview with Barthes. It provides a unique insight into the poststructuralist movement and presents some of the pioneering essays on literature and culture, gender, film, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Although articles included here cover diverse areas--from the semiology of paragrams to the readability of Sade, a common perspective runs through them: the recognition of excess and the seduction of writing. The Tel Quel Readerfills a crucial gap in the English literature on literary and cultural theory and presents a case for the enduring value of the journal's enterprise.
How to Be French is a magisterial history of French nationality law from 1789 to the present, written by Patrick Weil, one of France’s foremost historians. First published in France in 2002, it is filled with captivating human dramas, with legal professionals, and with statesmen including La Fayette, Napoleon, Clemenceau, de Gaulle, and Chirac. France has long pioneered nationality policies. It was France that first made the parent’s nationality the child’s birthright, regardless of whether the child is born on national soil, and France has changed its nationality laws more often and more significantly than any other modern democratic nation. Focusing on the political and legal confron...
How can Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu prompt us to re-imagine the cinema? Although no-one goes to the cinema in the novel, and its narrator is critical of a 'merely' cinematographic account of reality, the proposition of Thinking Cinema with Proust is that the Recherche can provide a powerful catalyst for re-thinking the cinema, and that the 'structural absence' of cinema from Proust's novel is rich in implications. Drawing on a complex terrain of intersections and overlaps between the experience of the spectator and that of Proust's narrator and reader, the book is focused around a series of motifs - reverie, the camera obscura, the magic lantern, projection, gesture and 'screen memory' - which enable a fluid movement back and forth between Proust and film theory. Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King's College London.