The Seducer
Ferdinand Mount: De Gaulle, 2 August 2018
A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle
by Julian Jackson.
Allen Lane, 887 pp., £35, June 2018,978 1 84614 351 9 Show More
by Julian Jackson.
Allen Lane, 887 pp., £35, June 2018,
“... We went down to the beach quite early. The other families staying at St-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the summer of 1951 were mostly French. Several of them had those early portable radios, chunky wooden boxes covered in rexine (I had just been given a dark-green one for my 12th birthday but had left it at home). We had not been on the beach long before the radios seemed to be squawking louder than usual, and there was a strange commotion around us ... ”