Charles Glass handles this rich and complex material well, and while the book could have been shorter, he never loses the reader’s attention. There are solecisms, some unfortunate, like the no doubt typographical confusion over the date of the 20 July plot, others surprising, like his use of the word Kulturkampf (Bismarck’s anti-Catholic campaign in the 1870s) to denote Germanic attitudes to culture. He follows the now widespread practice of awarding De Gaulle a small ‘d’ yet betrays a lack of familiarity with the particule nobiliaire, which is only used in conjunction with a title or a first name: ‘de Chambrun’ on its own sounds as silly as would ‘of Wellington’.

The story Glass has chosen to tell may not be central to it, but involving as it does a wide spectrum of humanity caught up in the conditions of wartime France — a cocktail-party by comparison with the danse macabre taking place elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe but one haunted by suffering and tragedy nonetheless — it provides valuable insights into a little-known theatre of that great tragi-comic mess which we call the second world war. 

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP