![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He has published widely on French literature and history. The living manifestation of the colourful and varied world he described, yet at the same time its most astonishing exception, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography. As on Desert Island Discs, after early struggle, success just kind of suddenly arrives, helped by the fact that Balzac penned his own rave reviews in the papers, a common practice at the time. Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Graham Robb has produced a masterpiece literary biography in which Balzac bursts into life on every page. Perhaps with those exams in mind, Robb devotes more effort to comment than narrative, so the book is sometimes hard to read and we never really know how Balzac became quite as famous as he did. Oddly it is one genuine aspect of his influence that Robb fails to mention. In Balzac everybody's character is written in their face, and he made the pseudo-science of physiognomy so popularly understood and respected, especially in relation to crime, that for generations the French police determined guilt by running measuring-calipers over the suspect and men were sent to the guillotine for no better reason than that their eyes were too close together. His latest book is The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts. In other words Balzac is indeed dated, a very unmodern writer, which is probably why almost no one reads him any more except to mug up for exams. Graham Robb is the author of biographies of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud. ![]()
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