Something to Declare

8vo. Pp. xviii, 304, [8 (blank)]. Note. Printed card wraps reproducing a painting by Howard Hodgkin in red, blue, and white. The first of two Picador proofs issued for this book, the latter bound in white wrappers.

Signed by Author to title page.

Dedicated to his parents who fed his Francophilia, the author's second collection of essays, covering the whole gamut of French culture. Originally published over a twenty-year period in the pages of the New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, and The New Yorker, amongst many others.

"Barnes has become something like that impossible reader Flaubert wished for and thought he'd never have: someone able to capture a certain tournure d'esprit, someone who could prove wrong his own dictum that 'words are a rolling mill that always flatten feeling', someone much wiser and fonder (and more unforgiving) than any mere Flaubertian." –Alberto Manguel, The Spectator

"I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert." –Sir Kingsley Amis