Quotes from Graham Robb

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.

The paysans had no flags or written histories, but they expressed their local patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbours and celebrating their own nobility.

The 1994 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Britain finds that the only obvious distinguishing feature of British homosexuals apart from sexual orientation is a tendency to live in London.

above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

Mail', from the Old Norse 'mal', meant 'tribute' or 'rent' – which was sometimes paid in meal or grain – while 'black' was the common collective noun for cows, bulls and oxen, which were usually black. 'Grassmail' was money paid to a landowner for grazing rights; 'blackmail' paid for the protection and recovery of cattle.

You, man, who read these lines, they are written to you by a brother who has suffered much. My thoughts are wrung from the deepest distress, yet still they try to find expression. O, that you could and would understand me! Some people are capable of deep, heartfelt, self-sacrificing love, yet the only possible object of their love is a person of their own sex. There are said to be such women, and I know that such men exist. I myself am such a man. These confessions contain a life of anguish.

and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace" (pg. 85)

It is one of the joys of studying history that first impressions are always wrong. Truth is proverbially stranger than fiction, but only because no guiding mind has contrived to make it credible.

For the rest of her life, she lives in a low, dark house of white stone. It has a wide tiled roof and a hawthorn bush to ward off lightning. Outdoors, she wears a full green flannel skirt and a pointy hood. She is more prolific than the fields, which produce a crop of barley or rye only once every two years.

To many foreign travellers, the characteristic sound of the French Revolution was the constant crepitation of muskets in the countryside exterminating the animals that had once enjoyed aristocratic immunity.

effects of her husband's lovemaking, but only one reliable method exists, and anyone who has come home after dark on the back road by the pond has heard the sad croaking of the Night Washerwomen who are condemned to wash the shrouds and corpses of the children that they killed.

Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départements, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice. When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity.

Further west, on the edge of the Iraty forest, a naked, hairy man who could run like a deer, and who was later thought to be the remnant of a Neanderthal colony, was spotted several times in 1774, indulging in his favourite pastime: scattering flocks of sheep. On the last occasion, when the shepherds tried to catch him, he ran away, giggling, and was never seen again.

Roused from the sleep of countless centuries by alcoholism and political hysteria, primitive traits had reasserted themselves in the modern world. (pg. 165)

ALLEGORY IS STILL a contentious aspect of gay writing. To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is 'appropriation' or 'prurience'. Associating it with something in one's own love life is either 'conscripting a writer for the cause' (gay) or 'demonstrating its universal relevance' (straight).

highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.

He had turned the loss of his virginity into a campaign, when all it took was a few sous and five minutes of his time. (pg 21)

MEN AND WOMEN who did almost nothing for a large part of the year tend not to figure prominently in history books. Studies and museums naturally highlight enterprise and undervalue the art of remaining idle for months on end.

The implication was that a cure might be the mental equivalent of amputating a healthy limb. Some patients seemed to need nothing but encouragement to regain their health. As one of Krafft-Ebing's early patients exclaimed: 'Ever since I gave free rein to my Uranian nature, I have been happier, healthier and more productive!