Julian Barnes Something to Declare (Picador/Macmillan). This journalistically highbrow collection of essays on French culture – films, music, the Tour de France, and of course Flaubert – wears its French-style intellectualism on its sleeve, but succeeds in getting under the skin anyway.Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project (Belknap/Harvard). An all-encompassing portrait of Paris from 1830–1870, in which the passages are used as a lens through which to view Parisian society. Never completed, Benjamin's magnum opus is a kaleidoscopic assemblage of essays, notes and quotations, gathered under such headings as "Baudelaire", "Prostitution", "Mirrors" and "Idleness". James Boswell An Account of Corsica, current edition published as The Journal of a Tour to Corsica (In Print Publishing, UK). Typically robust and witty account of encounters with the Corsican people. Excerpts published in Journals of James Boswell (Mandarin/Yale UP). Dorothy Carrington Granite Island (Penguin, UK, o/p). By far the best study of Corsica ever written in English. A fascinating and immensely comprehensive book, combining the writer's personal experiences with an evocative portrayal of historical figures and events. Julien Green Paris (Marion Boyars). A collection of very personal sketches and impressions of the city, by an American who has lived all his life in Paris, writes in French, and is considered one of the great French writers of the century. Bilingual text. Richard Holmes Fatal Avenue (Pimlico/Trafalgar Square). The phrase is de Gaulle's, used to describe France's northeast frontier whose notorious topographical vulnerability has made it the natural route for invaders since time began. An exciting and informative read. Richard Holmes Footsteps (Flamingo/Vintage). A marvellous mix of objective history and personal account, such as the tale of the author's own excitement at the events of May 1968 in Paris, which led him to investigate and reconstruct the experiences of the British in Paris during the 1789 Revolution. Laurence Sterne A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (Penguin/Viking). Rambling tale by the eccentric eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy who, despite the title, never gets further than Versailles. Robert Louis Stevenson Travels with a Donkey (OUP/Koneman). Mile-by-mile account of Stevenson's twelve-day trek in the Haute Loire and Cévennes uplands with the donkey Modestine. Devotees of Stevenson's footpaths – and there's a surprising number in France – might be interested in his first book, Inland Voyage, on the waterways of the north. Freda White Three Rivers of France (Pavilion/Faber, o/p), West of the Rhone (Faber, US, o/p), Ways of Aquitaine (Faber, o/p). Freda White spent a great deal of time in France in the 1950s before tourism came along to the backwater communities that were her interest. These are all evocative books, slipping in the history and culture painlessly, if not always too accurately.
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