Fatal Purity
Fatal Purity
ISBN: 9780805082616
出版社: Henry Holt & Co
出版年: 2007-4
页数: 408
定价: $ 22.60
装帧: Pap
内容简介
Robespierre was only 36 when he died, sent to the guillotine where he had sent thousands ahead of him. Only a few months before, this pale and fragile man, formal, anxious to the point of paranoia, steeled by deep-held principles, had held centre place in the new Festival of the Supreme Being, wearing his sky-blue coat and decreeing a new religion for France. Robespierre and the Revolution were inseparable: a single inflexible tyrant. But what turned a shy young lawyer into the living embodiment of the Terror at its most violent? Admirers called him 'the great incorruptible'; critics dubbed him a 'monster', a 'bloodthirsty charlatan'; even his friends found him hard to understand. Ruth Scurr sheds a dazzling new light on this puzzle, tracing Robespierre's life from a troubled childhood in provincial Arras to the passionate idealist, fighting for the rights of the people, and sweeping on to the implacable leader prepared to sign the death warrant for his closest friends. No backdrop can match the French revolution: it burns with human interest. As Scurr says, "More than haunting, it obsesses, because it will not lie down and die". Her brilliant, probing narrative brings the Revolution and its chilling hero to fiery life once again, helping us to understand how ideals and fanaticism can so often go hand in hand, as they still do today.
作者简介
露丝·斯科尔（Ruth Scurr），1971年生，曾在牛津大学和剑桥大学求学，获剑桥大学政治学博士学位，现在剑桥大学讲授政治学和历史学课程。她还是一位出色的文化批评家，是《纽约书评》《泰晤士报文学副刊》撰稿人。本书一经出版即得到知识界关注，引起热烈反响。