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Footprints in Paris
Footprints in Paris
Oct 17, 2024 10:26 AM

Author:Gillian Tindall

Footprints in Paris

Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life into the generations of those who have walked the earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives, she evokes the texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris which has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity.

Five individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked from Edinburgh to Paris at the time of Napoleon's downfall; the self-made Victorian businessman who traded with the brash capital of the Second Empire; his reserved son who found in the old stones of Paris a refuge from his fraught childhood; Maud, the archetypal English spinster, who somehow managed to construct an alternatative experience in Paris; and Julia , young and desperate, who found her own unlikely salvation there in a very different era.

Gillian Tindall brings Paris alive - whether it's the network of streets that form the Left Bank, the resonance of 'Bohemia' and its garrets, cafes and artists, 'Gay Paree' with its music halls and courtesans or the past chroniclers of the city such as Zola, George du Maurier and Orwell. But featured far more than the famous, are the unsung citizens for whom Gillian Tindall has such empathy.

Reviews

Tindall writes of a lost Paris with a quiet eloquence that is all her own, combining scrupulous honesty with a compassionate imagination and an eye for memorable detail

—— Miranda Seymour , Guardian

It's a fascinating walking tour of old Paris, studded with humour and sympathetic glimpses into several lives that have resisted the microscope of history

—— Tim Martin , Telegraph

The book's true strength lies in its writer's abiding, for-better-for-worse attachment to her city of the heart

—— Jonathan Keates , Sunday Telegraph

Tindall's alertness to detail and brimming intelligence are consistently engaging

—— Frances Spalding , The Independent

delightful book invites reflection, speculation, argument, and almost every page also summons memories

—— Allan Massie , Literary Review

Tindall... can create vivid portraits out of a few misty pixels

—— Graham Robb , Sunday Times

An enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch

—— Anita Brookner , The Spectator

Charming disinterment of a lost 19th - and 20th -century Paris...An antidote to the history of great men and events

—— The Guardian Saturday Review, SUMMER READS

This book is a personal memoir, a history of the left bank of Paris and an endlessly compelling tale of a family who lived in and out of Paris through two centuries of war, conflict and great politics...Nostalgia is of course a key trope in Parisian history and this book, richly textured and beautifully written, is a wonderful addition to that canon

—— Andrew Hussey , History Today

Absorbing

—— Daily Mail

A glorious read!

—— Mojomums

A splendid pontine read.

—— Londonist

A delightful and informative romp.

—— Richard Boon , N16

As a chronicle of social and architectural history, this is an informative and fun read

—— Bookbag

Tindall transforms bricks and mortar into fascinating social history

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

—— Guardian

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

—— Good Book Guide

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

—— UK Regional Press

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

—— Emily Gowers , Times Literary Supplement

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

—— Oldie

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

—— William Dalrymple , Observer

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

—— Dan Jones , Telegraph

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

—— Financial Times

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

—— Good Book Guide

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

—— Robbie Millen , The Times

A fresh and readable account

—— Fachtna Kelly , Sunday Business Post

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

—— Nicholas Lezard , Guardian

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

—— Christopher Hart , Sunday Times

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

—— Peter Stothard , The Times

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

—— Herald

A captivating travelogue.

—— Helena Gumley-Mason , Lady

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

—— BBC History Magazine

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

—— Good Book Guide

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

—— TIME (Top 10 Fiction Books of Year)

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.

—— Daily Telegraph
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