In recent years it's become fashionable to tell a certain kind of story about Britain. At its least offensive, this story emphasises the worst aspects of Britain's past and neglects the best. At its most damaging, it denies, demeans or distorts the very fabric of our collective inheritance.In Our Islands' Story, Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs aim to tell a better story about Britain. Though not without fault, they argue, Britain's history is rich in achievements of enduring...

France and Britain, indispensable allies in two world wars, remember and forget their shared history in contrasting ways. The book examines key episodes in the relationship between the two countries, including the outbreak of war in 1914, the battles of the Somme and Verdun, the Fall of France in 1940, Dunkirk, and British involvement in the French Resistance and the 1944 Liberation. The contributors discuss how the two countries tend to forget what they owe to each other, and have a disto...

THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERGeography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.In this succinct book, Tombs shows t...

Here is an incomparably rich portrait of France in the years when the disparate elements that made up the fragmented kingdom of the ancien regime were forged into the modern nation. The survey begins with an exploration of national obsessions and attitudes. It considers the tendency to revolution and war, the preoccupation with the idea of a New Order and the deep strain of national paranoia that was to be intensified by the dramatic debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Robert Tombs then in...

Leading international historians examine the impact of nationhood and nationalism on French life. World-renowned contributors (many publishing for the first time in English), include Eugene Weber, Zeev Sternill, Pierre Sorlin and Jean-Claude Allain.

The Paris Commune was the biggest and last popular revolution in western Europe - ending the cycle of revolutions that started in 1789. The Parisians, reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War set up their own revolutionary administration. Government troops eventually retook the city and took a terrible revenge: thousands died in the bloodbath that followed. The short-lived Commune and its repression cast a long shadow. It exposed deep divisions in French society and became a potent i...

The acclaimed account of the English people, now updated with two new chapters'Masterful, an enormously readable narrative of the English people from the Anglo-Saxons to the present' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the YearIn The English and their History, the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they ha...

Cross Channel Currents explores the understandings and misunderstandings that make up the Entente Cordiale - the hundred-year relationship between Britain and France, as well as the everyday common interests and shared pleasures that give it substance.Contributors include the late Roy Jenkins, in a witty and personal view of Winston Churchill's relationship with France; Pierre Messmer, a companion of Charles de Gaulle during World War II and later his prime minist...

A brilliant modern translation by Christine Donougher of Victor Hugo's thrilling masterpiece, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.This is the best translation of the novel available in English, as recommended by David Bellos in The Novel of the Century.Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become...

From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours, Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs', the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection.In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on p...

From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours, Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs', the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection.In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on p...

There is a need to tell a better story about Britain because bad stories are being told. These are 'bad' in the sense both of doing the historical facts an injustice, and of causing damaging political effects. One bad story currently dominant is one that portrays Britain as a systemically racist country, whose racism is rooted in its colonial history, which was nothing but a litany of worldwide oppression and exploitation. This bad story has real-time political consequences.A Bette...