Ruth Scurr

Guardians of an ideal

Are the French really natural-born philosophers? Sudhir Hazareesingh’s portrait in How The French Think is affectionate, familiar and fondly teasing

issue 20 June 2015

Sudhir Hazareesingh’s bold new book is built on the assumption that ‘it is possible to make meaningful generalisations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French’. France, as General de Gaulle pointed out, has such a fetish for singularity that it produces 246 varieties of cheese.

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