In the saddle

1990, December 28 broadcast, PBS Newshour, David Gergen the pessimism […] in this country was in the saddle even before Saddam Hussein came along

Once or twice a year, I travelled through France with the dedicatee of this book [Margaret Hambrick, the author's wife] at the speed of a nineteenth-century stagecoach. Cycling not only makes it possible to conduct exhaustive research into local produce, it also creates an enormous appetite for information. Certain configurations of field, road, weather and smell imprint themselves on the cycling brain with inexplicable clarity and return sometimes years later to pose their nebulous questions. A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama […] This book is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library. It describes the lives of the inhabitants of France – wherever possible, through their own eyes – and the exploration and colonization of their land by foreigners and natives, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. It follows a roughly chronological route, from the end of the reign of Louis XIV to the outbreak of the First World War, with occasional detours through pre-Roman Gaul and present-day France.