Just bought it today, with a slightly less charming cover, at a second-hand bookstore. From the Times obituary: “Here was a Frenchman’s take on the mindset of that most eccentric of beings: the retired army officer from over the Channel, steeped in the values of Empire and public schools, a close cousin of the Colonel Blimps and other denizens of Cheltenham villas or gentlemen’s clubs. Except that this major was living in France because of his marriage to a French woman. And so, in Daninos’s Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954), we have a Frenchman observing an Englishman observing the French. Between entente cordiale and misunderstanding, Daninos worked this rich seam with humour that was finely observed, sometimes acerbic but never aggressive, and bequeathed a host of aphorisms and observations: “A Frenchman without a mistress is like an Englishman without a club…”

Just bought it today, with a slightly less charming cover, at a second-hand bookstore.

From the Times obituary:

“Here was a Frenchman’s take on the mindset of that most eccentric of beings: the retired army officer from over the Channel, steeped in the values of Empire and public schools, a close cousin of the Colonel Blimps and other denizens of Cheltenham villas or gentlemen’s clubs. Except that this major was living in France because of his marriage to a French woman. And so, in Daninos’s Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954), we have a Frenchman observing an Englishman observing the French.

Between entente cordiale and misunderstanding, Daninos worked this rich seam with humour that was finely observed, sometimes acerbic but never aggressive, and bequeathed a host of aphorisms and observations: “A Frenchman without a mistress is like an Englishman without a club…”

Notes