Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of France with a broken heart. Shortly after he took office, his second wife, Ceceila, left him for another man. He sat brooding alone by night in the Presidential Palace. Though on top of the world, and one of the most powerful men in Europe, he felt very much alone. Sick of his own company, he asked a friend to arrange a dinner party - and Carla Bruni was included on the guest list. A former supermodel and chart-topping singer-songwriter, Carla had a reputation as a man-eater: and she dined on the most exclusive Cordon Bleu. Her former suitors and boyfriends inlcluded Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Primer Minister Laurent Fabius and billionaire Donald Trump. But more than wealth and artistic brilliance, 'I want a man with nuclear power', she said: and Sarkozy had his finger on the button. The two flirted all night: and their first private date came twnety-four hours later. Within a few months, the President of France had a new finacee. Based on exclusive interviews with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and many of the French elite close to both her and the President, this is the true and previously untold story of Europe's most glamorous couple. Read of how they met, fell instantly in love, and played a cat and mouse game with the world press before marrying in secret, to the amazement of the French people. A bestseller in France, this is the definitive account of the world's most gripping and dramatic modern tale of true romance.

A romance in reverse is set in Paris and London and follows an artist's attempts to fall back in love with his wife after the end of his affair, an effort that is challenged by the sale of a personal painting and his wife's discovery of his infidelity.

Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of France with a broken heart. Shortly after he took office, his second wife, Ceceila, left him for another man. He sat brooding alone by night in the Presidential Palace. Though on top of the world, and one of the most powerful men in Europe, he felt very much alone. Sick of his own company, he asked a friend to arrange a dinner party - and Carla Bruni was included on the guest list. A former supermodel and chart-topping singer-songwriter, Carla had a reputation as a man-eater: and she dined on the most exclusive Cordon Bleu. Her former suitors and boyfriends inlcluded Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Primer Minister Laurent Fabius and billionaire Donald Trump. But more than wealth and artistic brilliance, 'I want a man with nuclear power', she said: and Sarkozy had his finger on the button. The two flirted all night: and their first private date came twnety-four hours later. Within a few months, the President of France had a new finacee. Based on exclusive interviews with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and many of the French elite close to both her and the President, this is the true and previously untold story of Europe's most glamorous couple. Read of how they met, fell instantly in love, and played a cat and mouse game with the world press before marrying in secret, to the amazement of the French people. A bestseller in France, this is the definitive account of the world's most gripping and dramatic modern tale of true romance.

The hidden truth about the French way of life: it's all about seduction—its rules, its pleasures, its secrets France is a seductive country, seductive in its elegance, its beauty, its sensual pleasures, and its joie de vivre. But Elaine Sciolino, the longtime Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has discovered that seduction is much more than a game to the French: it is the key to understanding France. Seduction plays a crucial role in how the French relate to one another—not just in romantic relationships but also in how they conduct business, enjoy food and drink, define style, engage in intellectual debate, elect politicians, and project power around the world. While sexual repartee and conquest remain at the heart of seduction, for the French seduction has become a philosophy of life, even an ideology, that can confuse outsiders. In La Seduction, Sciolino gives us an inside view of how seduction works in all areas, analyzing its limits as well as its power. She demystifies the French way of life in an entertaining and personal narrative that carries us from the neighborhood shops of Paris to the halls of government, from the gardens of Versailles to the agricultural heartland. La Seduction will charm you and encourage you to lower your defenses about the French. Pull up a chair and let Elaine Sciolino seduce you.

Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general. Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is “dying of sadness.” He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual; his career is pretty much over; and he has to keep himself thoroughly medicated to cope with day-to-day life. Suffocating in the rampant loneliness, consumerism, hedonism, and sprawl of the city, Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses and where he was once in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and by European agricultural policies, and encounters farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to a simpler age. As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and of a suffering body politic are not so different, and that all parties may be rushing toward a catastrophe that a whole drugstore’s worth of antidepressants won’t make bearable.

An NPR Best Book of 2017 Heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At ninety-four, she was embroiled in what has been called the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families, set in the most romantic city—and involving the most glamorous industry—in the world. The Bettencourt Affair started as a family drama but quickly became a massive scandal, uncovering L’Oréal’s shadowy corporate history and buried World War II secrets. From the Right Bank mansions to the Left Bank artist havens; and from the Bettencourts’ servant quarters to the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy; all of Paris was shaken by the blockbuster case, the shocking reversals, and the surprising final victim. It all began when Liliane met François-Marie Banier, an artist and photographer who was, in his youth, the toast of Paris and a protégé of Salvador Dalí. Over the next two decades, Banier was given hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, cash, and insurance policies by Liliane. What, exactly, was their relationship? It wasn’t clear, least of all to Liliane’s daughter and only child, Françoise, who became suspicious of Banier’s motives and filed a lawsuit against him. But Banier has a far different story to tell... The Bettencourt Affair is part courtroom drama; part upstairs-downstairs tale; and part characterdriven story of a complex, fascinating family and the intruder who nearly tore it apart.

In today’s liberal democracies, does the political process focus on the people, or on the political leaders representing them? Building upon the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber, ‘Toward Leader Democracy’ argues that we are currently seeing a movement toward an increasingly pronounced focus on political leaders – ‘leader democracy’. This form of democracy is fashioned by the political will, determination and commitment of top politicians, and is exercised through elite persuasion that actively shapes the preferences of voters so as to give meaning to political processes. As the text reveals, this marks a definite evolution within the world’s ‘advanced democracies’: democratic representation is today realised increasingly through active political leadership, as opposed to the former practices of statistically ‘mirroring’ constituencies, or the deliberative self-adjustment of the executive to match citizen preferences.