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Graham Robb

Graham Robb has written biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century was published in 2003.

From the London Review dated 5 July 2007

Come Back, You Bastards!

Medusa: The Shipwreck, the Scandal, the Masterpiece by Jonathan Miles Buy this book

The first reports of a gruesome disaster reached Paris on 5 September 1816. A French frigate, the Medusa, had run aground on the notorious and poorly mapped Arguin Bank off the coast of West Africa. It was the flagship of a small expedition sent to repossess the settlement of Senegal, which had been handed back to the French by the Treaties of Paris (1814 and 1815). The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, was, in Jonathan Miles’s words, ‘a rusty relic from the Ancien Régime who had not put to sea for about a quarter of a century’. When it ran aground, the Medusa had become separated from the rest of the expedition. [ read more . . . ]