Paris: The Secret History

(Paperback)

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Description

This authoritative yet juicy history book does for Paris what Peter Ackroyd's London- The Biography did for London - it is essential reading for any visitor to Paris 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.

Reviews

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

Author Bio

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.