A King's Ransom

Reviews / Votes

[Morande's] life reads like the script of a film, but in this minutely researched and well-written book the author uses his extraordinary life to demonstrate the scope and importance of the world-changing events Morande lived through and chronicled. Morande's career [is] finely illuminated in Simon Burrows's biography Good review in Standpoint. [An] excellent resurrection of Morande ... pacily written with a delicious sense of absurdity Simon Burrows, in the first attempt to reconstruct [Morande's] shadowy life since 1886, pursues him relentlessly through print and archive and the mists of obfuscation that were his natural habitat, and produces a fascinating portrait of a paradoxical man who lived by his poisonous pen. ... Burrows' lively, authoritative, and comprehensive narrative will make the compelling story more widely available... In [his] exemplary biography of Morande, libertine morality and political liberalism are situated uncomfortably, but convincingly side by side. A King's Ransom helps us understand how a corrupt and self-serving individual such as Morande came to be both a valued agent of the French monarchy and a contributor to the development of modern journalism in the years prior to 1789. A King's Ransom is meticulously researched: the collections of all of the pertinent major and even minor libraries and archives have been examined along with primary and secondary sources. It has been over a century and a quarter since the last biography of Theveneau de Morande was written. After Simon Burrows' definitive work, future scholars will not need another. One final comment about presentation is in order: this book is refreshingly free of typographical errors (I counted only four). At a time when publishers have become more and more dependent on computers and their spelling checkers, it is evident that the editors and the author reviewed the manuscript thoroughly before publication. After reading the biography, one could argue that if Morande had not existed, he would
have been a very unlikely creation in fiction, but Simon Burrows has produced a readable
work on him that it is doubtful it will need a new biographical revision for some time
to come. * French History, vol 26, no 3 *