Books by Richard Cobb

Richard Cobb (1919-96) CBE was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the University of Oxford. He was the author of numerous influential works about the history of France, particularly the French Revolution.

A Classical Education was first published in 1985. It followed immediately after Still Life and is again autobiographical though of a somewhat more macabre hue. At the centre is a murder committed by a school friend of Richard Cobb's.'What gives A Classical Education its fascination is the author's description of how he himself, a shy and introverted schoolboy from Tunbridge Wells, is drawn into a nightmarish melodrama from which it seems he was lucky to escape... this book is beautifully written'. Richard Ingrams, The Times

Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (the sub-title is important) was first published in 1984. It won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Literary Biography in that year. It is a classic among middle-class memoirs. In twenty-one short chapters the town is vividly anatomized. So too are its residents: meet Dr Ranking and, best of all, meet the Limbury-Buses living a life of contented ossification.'Cobb remembers, and that, as well as his redeeming freedom from all conventional standards of dignity and relevance, is what makes this offbeat, capricious book a rare treasure'. John Carey, Sunday Times 'A remarkable feat of making purest autobiography part of a general, social history... Cobb has broken one of the strangest silences in English social commentary; on the missing history of the English bourgeoisie'. Michael Neve, Times Literary Supplement