Honore de Balzac was one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived, and now at last he has a biography that tells his story in a way Balzac himself would have loved with all the ambiguities, the flaws, the illusions and myths, the realities of street and salon, the loves and affairs, and above all the imperishable stories that still have the power to make us laugh out loud in one minute and weep in the next. Robb has given us a splendid tale, meticulously researched, lovingly put together, and beautifully told. Those who know Balzac will not be able to put his book down; those who don t...

Graham Robb tells the complicated story of this colossal life with authority and sympathy. . . . Unquestionably, a magnificent biography.--Washington Square Press. of photos.

Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, and the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his published poems. But his posthumous career is even more astonishing: saint to symbolists and surrealists; poster child for anarchy and drug use; gay pioneer; a major influence on artists from Picasso to Bob Dylan.

The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America. Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. He describes the lives of gay men and women: how they discovered their sexuality and accepted or disguised it; how they came out; how they made contact with like-minded people. He also...

Graham Robb's literary biography of Honore de Balzac interweaves his life with his work to present a portrait of a tragi-comic hero of 19th-century France.

This history of homosexuality in the 19th century takes in both Europe and America. It is divided into themes: the treatment of homosexuals, both male and female, by the rest of society; the lives and loves of gay men and women and the early gay rights mov

An astute and engrossing biography from the author of Victor Hugo and Balzac.

Here is the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to the author's brilliant imagination.

Fifty generations ago the cultural empire of the Celts stretched from the Black Sea to Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. In six hundred years, the Celts had produced some of the finest artistic and scientific masterpieces of the ancient world. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing slavery and genocide to western Europe. Within eight years the Celts of what is now France were utterly annihilated, and in another hundred years the Romans had overrun Britain. It is astonishing how little remains of this great civilization.

While planning a bicycling trip along the...