"There cannot be much serious doubt that in the last twenty years Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has been one of the most - if not the most - original, versatile, and imaginative historians in the world...he has acquired an almost unique capacity to capture the imagination of a mass audience, while still retaining the respect and admiration of his professional colleagues." - LAWRENCE STONE, New York Review of Books. "In addition to being a gifted storyteller, Ladurie is a committed student of the 100-odd places historians must go to piece together the stories of the unwashed and unnoticed, of the techniques to weave incomplete and various kinds of evidence into the cloth of history...The essays share an interest in discovering what life itself, and not just the 'events' of life, was like in the past; how people lived, loved, took sick or didn't take sick - what they ate, who they listened to, the weather, the crops, status and the long-term trends of such things that give us a picture of aggregate life." - ROBERT DAWIDOFF, Los Angeles Times. ..".makes for provocative and interesting reading even for those who might consider themselves devotees of an older style of history...Ladurie is one of those unusual scholars who, even as he fulfils the typical expectation of his calling, is also transforming it with his own vision of what it might be." - STANLEY J. IDZERDA, Review of Politics.

Translated by: Ben Reynolds, Professor in French Sian Reynolds