An English Francophile who writes about France's history and geography, with interesting asides learned from touring the country on his bike. 20 chapters on well-known Frenchmen (and women) from our era and centuries past. Well-written. A good read for French history buffs. ( )

This book is not a conventional narrative of the history of Paris, nor is it the comprehensive study of its denizens that its title might suggest. Rather, what Graham Robb has written is a collection of short tales about some of the people and events that have experienced and shaped the city, from a trip taken by a young Corsican lieutenant to Paris on the eve of of the French Revolution (spoiler: it's Napoleon Bonaparte) to an account of the riots by second-generation immigrants in Paris's suburbs in 2005. Robb uses these stories to illuminate the distinctive character of Parisians and how they both reflect and contributed to the development of the modern metropolis. There is considerable variety both in Robb's selections and in their presentation, as a few of the tales are presented as dialogues or scripts. Inevitably some will be of greater appeal to readers than others depending on their own interests, but nearly everyone interested in the history of the "City of Lights" will find something in its pages to entertain and inform them. ( )

I've been beaten. I can't do it; I can't finish this book. The stories I've read so far are mostly really interesting, but the writing is so florid, so excessive, which such an effort to overly dramatise the narrative that I just can't dig my way through it any longer.

I'm bummed, because this could have been an incredibly fascinating collection if the writer hadn't gotten in the way of the stories themselves. Perhaps someday I'll give it another go, but for now, color me defeated. ( )

Some interesting stories about important people in the history of Paris, but the book lacks any coherent theme or point of view. Worse -- the author over-uses cute techniques such as delayed disclosure of the name of the person who is the central subject in a chapter. ( )

Highly uneven. Robb set out to write about Paris through a series of vignettes about lesser known events in the city's past. Sometimes that works really well, as in the chapter about the catacombs, Hitler's whistlestop tour of Paris in 1940, or when Robb recounts, with appropriate scepticism, what we know about the possible real life story which was the inspiration for The Count of Monte Cristo. Sometimes that's a lot less successful, as in the chapter about May '68 (which amusing to me as a clear send-up of academic history texts, because I read a lot of them, but I can see how it would be frustrating to non-academics) and in the chapter about Juliette Gréco, which was written as a quasi-existentialist screenplay and which I thought execrable. Since this is a book without footnotes or a clear explanation of methodology for each chapter, moreover, I was anxious about how far I trusted Robb's research—I caught a couple of things about medieval Paris (the Sainte-Chapelle is not a basilica, in the canonical or architectural sense) and I frequently had no idea if Robb's description of a person's mood, reaction or utterances was based on anything more than fancy on his part. One to dip into rather than read cover-to-cover. ( )