Outstanding. Enormously enjoyable to read – exciting, lively, funny, and admirably tolerant and objective in its opinions. It is hard to see how it could have been better done

Held me gripped by every page and I was impatient at any interruption. The details of this book are spellbinding, often frightening and sometimes funny

Skilfully balances historical narrative with social analysis, and tempering the appalling with the absurd

This book, like the city it discusses, oscillates satisfyingly between blunt history and roistering gossip

To understand France today you should read this book about France yesterday . . . a wonderfully enjoyable picture. It is compulsive reading

There is hardly any aspect of French life during that period which the authors do not explore, always with compelling liveliness and omniverous zeal. . . I shall return gratefully to it again and again

A rich and intriguing story which the authors disentangle with great skill

A perceptive portrait of Paris in its heyday

A beautifully written book about a vast tapestry of military, political and social upheaval. Remarkably well-researched, wise, balanced, very funny at times . . . I was a witness to events in Paris in the first desperate, glorious, mad weeks, and this is just how it was

A dashing, multi-dimensional story. This book covers all aspects of life – diplomacy, strategy, rationing, politics and politicking (from Churchill, Pétain’s and de Gaulle’s point of view), the international theatricals and the tourist invasion, blitzkrieg and Ritzkrieg – to create a lovely tapestry, threaded with facts and figures

Absorbing . . . a rich, many-layered account, selecting from official documents, private archives, memoirs and histories with a wonderful lightness of touch, so that the most complex events become clear