The work of the French literary review, intellectual grouping and publishing team Tel Quel had a profound impact on the formation of literary and cultural debate in the 1960s and 70s. Its legacy has had enormous influence on the parameters of such debate today. From its beginning in 1960 to its closure in 1982, it published some of the earliest work of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. It was also associated with some of the key ideas of the French avant-garde, publishing key articles by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.
The Tel Quel...

At different times in its history Tibet has been renowned for pacifism and martial prowess, enlightenment and cruelty. The Dalai Lama may be the only religious leader who can inspire the devotion of agnostics. Patrick French has been fascinated by Tibet since he was a teenager. He has read its history, agitated for its freedom, and risked arrest to travel through its remote interior. His love and knowledge inform every page of this learned, literate, and impassioned book.
Talking with nomads and Buddhist nuns, exiles and collaborators, French portrays a nation demoralized by a...

Author of the obscene narrative Story of the Eye and of works of heretical philosophy such as Inner Experience, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is one of the most powerful and secretly influential French thinkers of the last century. His work is driven by a compulsion to communicate an experience which exceeds the limits of communicative exchange, and also constitutes a sustained focus on the nature of this complusion. After Bataille takes this sense of compulsion as its motive and traces it across different figures in Bataille's thought, from an obsession with the thematics and the event of...

Researched with the full cooperation of its subject, this biography begins with Naipaul's upbringing in Trinidad, describes how his ambition took him to England, and looks at the factors that have made Naipaul one of the leading writers of his generation.

The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.
Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul s life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul s first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and...

Liberty or Death is Patrick French's vivid and surprising account of the chaotic final years of colonial rule in India, acclaimed as the definitive book on this subject. At midnight on 14 August 1947, Great Britain's 350-year-old Indian Empire was broken into three pieces. The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, and Britain's role as an imperial power came to an end. Journeying across India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, Patrick French brings to life a cast of characters including spies, idealists, freedom fighters and politicians from Winston...