In this engaging epistolary memoir, Howard Burton describes his early experiences of moving with his family to a medieval hilltop village called Le Pouget in Languedoc after years of running Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The Languedoc region is sometimes referred to as the “real South of France”— thanks to its largely unspoilt, breathtakingly-beautiful countryside, traditional wine-making villages and slower pace of life. This delightful book details what it is really like to move to France and try to build up a new life in a culture that Howard and his family thought they were familiar with until they encountered countless surprises, some positive and some negative…

Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting old regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as sublime spectacle.

Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution.