Book description
The Pocket Rough Guide
Paris is your essential guide to Europe's most elegant city;
covering all the key sights, hotels, restaurants, shops and bars you
need to know about. The easy-to-use Pocket Rough Guide
Paris includes brand new itineraries and a Best of Paris
section picking out the highlights you won't want to miss, plus
detailed listings to guide you from the iconic Eiffel Tower and boat
trips on the Seine to the city's offbeat art galleries and hidden-away
gardens.
Whether you have a few days or a week to fill, The Pocket Rough
Guide
Paris will help you make the most of your trip. Now available
in epub format.
James McConnachie was born and brought up in south London, and was a
scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied English. Touring the
Loire in the back seat of a Citro n DS, as a child, inspired an early
love of travel, but his first trips for Rough Guides were to Spain and
Italy - and he remains passionate about both countries. Then, in 2002,
James joined Dave Reed as co-author of the
Rough Guide to Nepal
. As a student, he had spent nine months teaching in a village in the
Everest foothills, but travelling all over the country, in the middle of
a Maoist insurrection, really put his knowledge of Nepali culture and
language to the test - and never more urgently than when persuading a
local Maoist that he was not in fact a CIA spy. After Nepal, James
returned to his Francophile roots. He was commissioned to rewrite the
Rough Guide to Paris
, alongside Ruth Blackmore, and then headed back to the Loire valley to
write his own, new guidebook: the
Rough Guide to the Loire
. Meanwhile, travel-related TV and radio appearances, including stints
on the sofa with Richard and Judy and guesting on Radio 4's Excess
Baggage, led to presenting work on Italy Inside Out, a five-part BBC
series on Italian language and culture, and Kirsty Wark's Tales from
Paris. James has also taken photographs for Rough Guides in Rome,
Florence, Venice and Hawaii. In recent years, James has turned to
history. With Robin Tudge, he co-authored the bestelling
Rough Guide
to Conspiracy Theories
, which exposes the truth behind over a hundred conspiracy canards, and
explores whether there is a conspiracist version of history. Bevis
Hillier, in the Spectator, called it "unusually intelligent and
laced with black humour". In
The Book of Love: In Search of the
Kamasutra
(Atlantic), James traced the secretive story of the world's most
notorious sex book, focusing on its discovery and pirate publication by
the nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton and his scandal-mongering
coterie. William Dalrymple, writing in The Times, called it
"elegant and stylish", The Washington Post found it a
"first-rate work of intellectual history", and it won him a
shortlisting for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2008. Scandalized
by the shrill and shallow quality of most modern sex manuals, James then
decided to write his own: a book that wouldn't only discuss "how to
do it", but would bring in history, ethics, politics, science and
culture as well. The Observer called his subsequent
Rough Guide to
Sex
"a comprehensive, fearless book, part socio-history and part
manual". The writer and feminist Jenny Diski found it "funny
and thoughtful"; the book's "clarity and
straightforwardness", she reckoned, "would make anyone who has
been young and befuddled (or old and befuddled) weep with
gratitude." James now lives in Winchester, Hampshire, with his
young family, but makes regular trips to France and Nepal to keep his
guidebooks up to date. He is passionate about singing, books, languages,
walking and wildlife. He is represented by David Godwin (
www.
davidgodwinassociates. co. uk
) and welcomes comments via his blog (
www. mcconnachie. net
).
