Cobb likes the past for its own sake, he feels at home in it, he knows practically everybody who lived in the 1790s. He is such a great historian because of his unique and very personal relationship with his subject. 

Like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations.  Here for the first time Cobb's widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour.

David Gilmour was one of Richard Cobb's students at Oxford in the early 1970s.  His books include the prize-winning biographies Curzon and The Last Leopard: A life of Guiseppe di Lampedusa.