Explore the vast range of titles available.

Established in a grand house near to the campus, [Norman Hampson] and [Jacqueline Gardin] became famous for their entertaining, with magnificent French food and wine, although in his commitment to crosswords, gardening and cricket, the pipe-smoking Norman could hardly have seemed more quintessentially British. In France, however, which the Hampsons and their two daughters visited each year to see their family, he spoke the language fluently and lectured easily without notes. Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1980 (modestly but misleadingly claiming \"it goes with the job\"), he was also the unanimous choice of the newly founded Society for the Study of French History in 1987 to be its first president. Though he formally retired from York the next year, he continued to write and teach at the university until his late 70s. Only with the death of Jacqueline in 2007 did his intellectual energy begin to flag. In a field of history that has always aroused strong passions and fierce disagreements, Norman was never confrontational. Like his favourite Enlightenment writer, Montesquieu, he enjoyed an argument, loved a paradox and preferred to make his points by irony rather than polemic. Accordingly he made no enemies. Yet he was a man of deep convictions, politically liberal and viscerally anti-authoritarian. He hated the totalitarian politics of Rousseau, and could find nothing redeeming in Marat or Saint-Just. Yet he was moved by the appeal of Rousseau's other writings to the deepest human feelings. He was even prepared to concede a \"potential humanity\" to [Maximilien Robespierre].

It was, [Colin Jones] insists, a bourgeois revolution. He finds clear evidence for a rising bourgeoisie over the 18th century in its rampant commercialism and what he calls the Great Chain of Buying. He finds that \"the middling sort - a variegated group, which could reasonably be called the bourgeoisie\" were best placed to benefit from the revolution, and did so. Writing it has involved incorporating and making accessible some formidably complex scholarly ideas. But the central methodology is very simple, not to say old-fashioned. It is to tell the story of how kings, their ministers and their mistresses tried, and ultimately failed, to meet the challenges faced by an 18th-century state. The political story of the revolution is quite familiar and continues, as here, to be retold regularly. That of the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, by contrast, had too often been scorned, and therefore neglected, as a meaningless succession of petty intrigues in boudoirs and bedrooms, unworthy of serious attention when there were economic cycles, demographic fluctuations, rising and falling classes, and deep-seated shifts in cultural values to analyse. Jones neglects none of these aspects so favoured by 20th-century historians, inserting them artfully at pausing-places in the narrative. Yet telling the story dominates his approach; and it will be an amazingly well-informed specialist who will learn nothing new from his account. Sometimes the style jars: not much of the elegance of 18th-century expression has rubbed off, even in translated quotations. But 21st-century readers will be left in no doubt that the factional struggles of Versailles mattered, and will be shown clearly how they helped to precipitate the most important series of upheavals in modern history.