A Time in Paris

In the sweltering Indian summer of 1870, a young Englishman is sent to Paris as Prussian invaders advance on the French capital with the largest siege army ever assembled. The City of Light is cut off from the outside world, the population trapped behind its tall ramparts. As the siege continues for a month, then a second, a hungering third, a frozen fourth and into a starved fifth, the Englishman, a stock young gentleman of his Victorian times, falls in love with a radical French enchantress who by chance saves his hide. The lovers’ fate is entwined with those of a tormented French general appointed to defend Paris and an impatient Prussian grandee (Otto von Bismarck) hell-bent on bringing the ‘capital of civilisation’ to its knees. The unlikely love story turns upon true events that have shaken our world through to the present. Praise for David Lawday’s recent book Danton: Giant of the French Revolution: “Spirited and highly readable… Lawday creates some great set pieces and striking turning points… He is able to capture the atmosphere of the early revolution: its inflammable mix of devilment and righteousness, reckless selflessness and flagrant self-promotion. He sees that Danton was more than the sum of his crimes, the sum of his secrets; he celebrates his ‘large heart and violent impulses in an irresolvable conflict’.” Hilary Mantel, The London Review of Books.