Search results for ""author norman hampson""

Dedicated to the ship's company of "La Moqueuse", this book is not so much an account of naval operations as a kind of social history. With the help of recollections, diaries and letters home, the author recreates the reactions of an undergraduate to his various incarnations as an ordinary seaman in a corvette, the most junior officer on board a destroyer and the British naval liaison officer in a Free French sloop. Roughly half of the book deals with the very special atmosphere in the Free French forces and the complex situation in southern France immediately after its liberation in August 1944. The volume as a whole provides a vivid impression of what it actually felt like to be involved in the day-to-day experience of helping to make a warship work.

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Armed with the insights of the scientific revolution, the men of the Enlightenment set out to free mankind from its age-old cocoon of pessimism and superstition and establish a more reasonable world of experiment and progress. Yet by the 1760s, this optimism about man and society had almost evaporated. In the works of Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, there was discernible a new inner voice, and an awareness of individual uniqueness which had eluded their more self-confident predecessors. The stage was set for the revolutionary crisis and the rise of Romanticism. In this book, Norman Hampson follows through certain dominant themes in the Enlightenment, and describes the contemporary social and political climate, in which ideas could travel from the salons of Paris to the court of Catherine the Great - but less easily from a master to his servant. On such vexed issues as the role of ideas in the "rise of the middle class" he provides a new and realistic approach linking intellectual and social history.

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