Paris is the city of light and the city of darkness - a place of ceaseless revolution and reinvention that for two thousand years has drawn those with the highest ideals and the lowest morals to its teeming streets.
In Andrew Hussey's wonderful book we encounter the myriad citizens whose stories have shaped Paris: the nineteenth-century flaneurs aimlessly wandering Haussman's new streets; survivors and victims of ravaging plagues; the builders of Notre Dame Cathedral; those who turned the River Seine red with blood on St Bartholomew's Day; and the many others whose lives have imprinted themselves on a city that has always aroused strong emotions.
Andrew Hussey was born in 1963. He first went to Paris in the late 1970s, fired up by the punk revolution in his home town of Liverpool and with a thirst for anarchy and adventure. His first taste of Paris was busking in the metro: he was hooked. He has since lived and worked in Manchester, Lyons, Paris, Aberystwyth, Madrid and Barcelona, writing on the Nineties Parisian fashion for suicides, anarchy, radical Islam, art terrorism, Situationism, football, pornography and The Fall for a wide range of magazines and newspapers. Andrew Hussey is a contributing editor of the Observer Sports Magazine, and Head of French and Comparative Literature at the University of London in Paris.
Title: Paris: The Secret History
Author: Hussey, Andrew
ISBN: 9780141011134
Binding:
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
Number of Pages: 528
Weight: 0.3584 kg
Outrageously readable . . . a fascinating riot of a book * Simon Sebag-Montefiore *
Fascinating . . . A vivid sans-culottes history, from the street up * David Starkey *
Magnificent and entertaining . . . riveting -- Jason Burke * Observer *
Fascinating . . . A vivid sans-culottes history, from the street up * David Starkey *