La vie en bleu - H. R Kedward

Every summer for vast numbers of holidaying British there is only one question that is reverted to over and over again: why are France and the French so odd? How can our near neighbour, who we share so much with and admire in so many ways, remain resolutely mysterious and, not infrequently, irritating? Rod Kedward has spent his entire adult life immersed in the study of France. He knows Paris intimately but is as much at home in the regions and the remote back country, la France profonde. He is fascinated by the great and often terrible dramas of modern France - the two cataclysmic wars, the Algerian disaster, the events of 1968 - but is equally obsessed with the special worlds of French family life, the workplace, immigration and leisure time. La Vie en bleu is the result of Kedward's obsessions - a book that is both definitive and completely fascinating. Crammed with surprising details, La Vie en bleu tells an ultimately very impressive story: how a country which has been under horrific political, military and social pressures kept its cohesion, never lapsed into civil war and - unlike its neighbours - retained, even in its darkest hour, a commitment to liberalism and democracy.