Graham Robb > Quotes

“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.”
― Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography

“In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.
Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate : it suggested old stew and course tobacco, the coat racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was - as though the set designer had intended some ironical epilogue - the smell of the real Latin Quarter.”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“members of”
― Graham Robb, France: An Adventure History

“Boredom was as powerful a force as economic need. It helps to explain so many aspects of daily life, at all times of the year, that it could form the basis of an academic discipline: cottage industries and hibernation, bizarre beliefs and legends, sexual experiment, local politics, migration and even social aspiration. In small, suspicious communities where neighbour competed with neighbour, boredom was one of the main elements of social cohesion. It brought people together and counteracted the effects of poverty and class rivalry.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“Roused from the sleep of countless centuries by alcoholism and political hysteria, primitive traits had reasserted themselves in the modern world. (pg. 165)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“It was during this savage campaign that some peculiarly outrageous behaviour of the borderers was first recorded by officers on both sides. The carnage would be well under way – the soldiers having orders to kill and to take no prisoners – when some Scottish and English warriors, standing less than a spear’s length from each other, were seen to be engaged in polite conversation. When they noticed the furious eye of a commanding officer, they began to prance about like novices in a fencing school, striking, as it were, only ‘by assent and appointment’. Some of those faux combatants eventually left the battlefield with half a dozen prisoners who seemed quite undismayed by their capture. This was all the more incredible since these men who seemed to be treading the planks of a stage rather than a blood-soaked mire were beyond suspicion of cowardice. These were the English and Scottish borderers whose reputation for martial skill and bravery was second to none.”
― Graham Robb, The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England

“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).”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“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.”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England

“…and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace” (pg. 85)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.
The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The gave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18–‘, is now known to contain the body of a woman. (pg. 110-111)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“Two years after the young lieutenant’s visit, when the Palais-Royal became a centre of revolutionary activity, she might have joined her sisters-in-arms in the historic meeting around the fountain, when ‘the demoiselles of the Palais-Royal’ vowed to publish their grievances and to demand fair remuneration for their patriotic labours:
The confederates of all parts of France who are joined together in Paris, far from having reason to complain of us, will retain a pleasant memory of the lengths to which we went to welcome them. (pg. 22)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“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.”
― Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

“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!”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century