PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Robb’s France: An Adventure History is a rich and vibrant narrative that ranges from the Gauls to the gilets jaunes...His clear-eyed but imaginative storytelling scrutinises the more idiosyncratic features of France’s historical landscape, beginning with what he calls an \'obscure act of genocide on a summer’s day in the late iron age\' — Julius Caesar’s massacre of the Nervii in northern Gaul...The account is based on Caesar’s own writing but infused with Robb’s infectious love of geography and nature...He begins with a detailed description of the saepes, the impenetrable hedges that once offered the Gaulish tribes a \'cloak of invisibility\' against the enemy...Embedded in this chapter is the long view that the only history worth writing is that which seeks to read the traces we humans leave on these lands that we pass through so briefly...Thus, Robb’s research only partly took place in libraries; much of it was done criss-crossing the country for more than 30 years on a bicycle...There is, inevitably, a touch of nostalgia attached to most historical writing...Robb’s is for a rural France free of high-speed trains and themed roundabouts...Nostalgia is excusable when the chosen subject is fuelled by affection — and a love of France does radiate from both these books...But when it comes to narrative history, love can no longer be blind...Since the digital revolution, the battle for control of \'national narratives\' has become more crucial than ever and as we watch the horrors unfold in Ukraine, any tendency to airbrush or glorify the past feels fraught with hazard.
