Graham Robb has bicycled thousands of miles over the decades in what is now France, and in this book, he takes readers along. Masters of the sea, the Venetians raised an empire through an ethos of service and loyalty to a republic that lasted a thousand years. What he has done in this informative and hugely entertaining book is to interest himself in an generally unknown area, open it up and relate it to the broader history of France. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. For that really is the lingering impression of this book: in whatever ephemeral, run-of-the-mill place you happen to be, it may have been at one point either the location of a momentous event buried by the sands of time, or it may have been visited by — or was maybe even the home of — someone who enjoyed a moment of celebrity in some past era.

If you don’t like traditional history text or even if you do and just want an unusual take on people or time periods that have been covered thousands of times, this could be the read for you. He divides his book into three loose chronological parts, “Ancient Gaul to the Renaissance,” “Louis XIV to the Second Empire,” and “The Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics. Along the way, readers will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history – Louis XIV, the French Revolution, the French Resistance, the Tour de France – but all presented in a shining new light.Who would have thought that even into the 18th century France was so divided, undeveloped… that you could get lost just trying to walk back to Paris. The real work here is done by history and human geography, with which Robb fashions an unforgettable lesson in the impermanence of current events, as if he’s standing next to his bicycle in a road cut across a mountain, pointing out the Gallo-Roman, Merovingian, Carolingian, Bourbon, Bonapartist, or Républicain strata, all of them buried in temporal soil only to be revealed by a hot new road project that will itself someday vanish in time. His history rock-hound nuggets are the stars of the show, providing him with the conversation pieces that give this book its unique flavor.

I have realised, halfway through it, that I should have read a convential history on France before I picked Robb's up. I do not know if this is a "style" worth categorising separately from other styles of telling history under an objective point of view, but it certainly does on my shelf. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. I'd classify this as much more of a popular history book, it's readable and the author makes an attempt to be funny and engaging, anyone looking for a more academic approach to the history will be disappointed. Each chapter is a self-contained story, there is not much cohesion in how the history is approached, and there are often huge gaps not covered as the author bounces between topics.

To conclude, and realising Robb's style has, for better or worse, infected what I am trying to convey to you innocent reader, his book was a completely new experience for me. Overall the book covered certain aspects very well, but suffers from huge gaps in history and the writing was overly complex but is still worthwhile reading. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. What I mean is in each chapter, I couldn't help but feel like freefalling through time itself, seeing swathes of reality and abstractions that manifest themselves in what makes up France, both tangible and intangible.