Discovery of France

I enjoyed Caroline Weber's review of "The Discovery of France" by Graham Robb. It looks like a must read!
Her quotation about the localities from which different experts were drawn reminded me of the time just after the Second World War when the Breton onion sellers tramped the South Wales mining valleys selling their long strings of onions.

And how frustrated my mother was, who had been a French teacher, when she found they could not understand her Parisian French (via the University of Wales) while my Welsh speaking father could with difficulty converse with them.

Sent to New York Times Book Review