The definitive biography of the greatest French statesman of modern times.
Julian Jackson is Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London and one of the foremost British experts on twentieth-century France. His previous books include France- The Dark Years, 1940-1944, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book Award, and his celebrated The Fall of France, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2004. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques.
Julian Jackson's biography is a worthy monument to this
extraordinary figure. He has a good eye for the telling quotation
and a magnificent capacity to place de Gaulle, one of the most
fascinating subjects in twentieth-century politics, in his
historical and political setting. The result is a wonderful history
of modern France disguised as the biography of a statesman.
*New York Review of Books*
Jackson's new biography makes awesome reading, and is a tribute to
the fascination of its subject, and to Jackson's mastery of it.
*Sunday Times*
A tour de force, and by far the best biography in English to
date.
*Standpoint*
Scholarship of the highest class ... a truly great book, for after
this all other biographies can be cast aside.
*Sunday Telegraph*
A Certain Idea of France is more than just another, bigger,
biography ... he has the skill and style to maintain a dramatic
narrative over nearly 800 pages of text
*Spectator*
A Certain Idea of France is full of fascinating detail and anecdote
... It is a suitably monumental achievement.
*The Times*
Only a great biography could do justice to such a man. This one
does it, magnificently.
*Sunday Telegraph*
Jackson has written a biography that fully matches de Gaulle's
remarkable life. ... This is too an extremely busy book, packed
with anecdote, adventure and the kind of insider gossip that can
only be foraged by an expert historian who is comfortable in the
archives but who has eyes and ears ever alert to the telling
details.
*New Statesman*
Compelling and painstakingly documented
*Economist*
With a fluent style and near-total command of existing and newly
available sources, he peers behind the monolithic façade to unmask
a composite of opposing traits ... crafting the finest one-volume
life of de Gaulle in English, Julian Jackson has come closer than
anyone before him to demystifying this conservative at war with the
status quo, for whom national interests were inseparable from
personal honour and "a certain idea of France."
*Wall Street Journal*
Remarkable ... To tell the life of De Gaulle is also to chart the
history of modern France, and in this suitably monumental biography
rich with illuminating anecdotes, Jackson portrays his subject as a
complex and contradictory character
*Guardian*
In this superb biography, a masterpiece of empathy as well as
scholarship, Julian Jackson has probably made the best effort yet
to elucidate the truth about this awkward, opaque, vindictive and
messianic man. ... though erudite, incisive and painstakingly
balanced, Jackson's biography is no dry-as-dust study. He writes
with verve and wit.
*Prospect*
Drawing on recently declassified presidential archives, Jackson
sheds new and revealing light on the inner workings of the Gaullian
executive ... exemplary
*Times Literary Supplement*
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