time’. It evoked an atmosphere of a country in which everyone was talking at the same time and could not hear what others said, but, yet another reviewer concluded, Zeldin ‘succeeded in solving the problem of describing chaos and confusion in a way which does not distort them… Occasionally books appear which can immediately be identified as classics; to wait for the judgement of posterity is entirely unnecessary. Theodore Zeldin’s book…has just taken its legitimate place on the shelf beside Gibbon, Burckhardt and the other giants’. Other reviewers added: ‘Truly a work of genius’. ‘One of the major works of our collective lifetime’ ‘He has carried history to a rare summit. He amuses, irritates and instructs… This is one of the greatest history books of this century, without the least doubt, irreplaceable.’ ‘A master is among us’ The French Zeldin completed his history with an investigation of the manners and preoccupations of contemporary French people. Once more he redraws the lines produced by averages and statistics, using portraits based on his own personal conversations with a huge variety of people, sometimes in unusual places, like the Communist Party School for training militants (where he is impressed by the quality of the food), the elite National School of Administration (where he analyses the quality of the ambitions of students competing for the top jobs), and a mental hospital where he spends three days discussing both reality and fantasy with the inmates. His conclusion is that there are as many minorities in France as there are inhabitants. Instead of advising on monuments or ruins to visit, Zeldin treats each person as a monument to be deciphered and appreciated. Each of the thirty chapters attempts to lay bare how relationships and dilemmas are lived at a personal level, under such titles as 'What lovers want from each other', 'Why it is becoming harder to find and keep a spouse', 'How to be friends with a peasant', 'How to be chic', 'How not to be intimidated by their intellectuals', 'What becomes of the drop outs', and 'How to laugh at their jokes'. He illustrates the text with cartoons by prominent humorists mocking hypocrisy and platitude. ‘It makes a capital discovery', wrote a Paris professor of political science. 'Zeldin offers profound modifications of the analyses which, following Tocqueville, are generally proposed about France's problems. Its intelligence and rigour are fascinating'. Whereas Tocqueville famously predicted that