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Hello. I suffered badly from Franco-Filia in the early 70s. It was a time when

Fuko's madness and civilization, Barth's mythologies and deridars on grammatology swelled my briefcase.

A time when I laid Lecanian analysis on neurotic friends, a time when I'd ignore the

University Film Club unless it was showing Godard or Truffo a time when my well my musical

taste was decidedly more more Eiffel Tower than top of the pops. You see, although I could just about tell that Jack Braille in that song was comparing

the bourgeois of pigs and knew that this represented some sort of ideological advance on living doll,

I never truly loved his music, any more than I wholly understood Derry-Darr or Lacan,

or unlike my friend Andy Tudor, never properly grasped the notion of the film

director as oter. I was not so much comprehending French intellectual life as

attempting to nuzzle up to it.

Well, I was forcibly reminded of my pretensions,

which even extended to smoking disc blur,

driving a 2cv, and affecting a black roll-top pullover

by a very, very fine new book called

How the French Think an Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People.

It's a book which certainly celebrates French thought. We're told in the words of French historian Andrei Siegfried that French

thought has been the driving force behind all the major advances of human civilization.

And the author himself, Sir dear Hazarizing, reminds us that French philosophy taught the world to reason with such sweeping and bold systems as rationalism, republicanism, feminism,

feminism, existentialism and structuralism.

But that, argues the author, is now all in the world. and structural

...