Marianne, Fantasio, Don't Trifle With Love, The Candlestick, A Diversion, A Door Must be Open or Shut, You Can't Think of Everything The seven plays in this collection share a light-hearted tone, though with occasional and unexpected moments of seriousness. In Marianne, a confirmed cynic intercedes with a married woman on behalf of his best friend. In the eponymous hero of the modern 'fairy tale' Fantasio, by turns imaginative, abrupt and perceptive, Musset provides us with a compelling self-portrait. Don't Trifle with Love shows the dangerous strategems of two childhood sweethearts, supposedly destined for marriage. In The Candlestick, an infatuated clerk is set up as a decoy by his employer's young wife and her lover. The one-act plays A Diversion, A Door Must be Open or Shut and You Can't Think of Everything deal, in witty, epigrammatic style, with various aspects of romance: a wife and her friend test her husband's fidelity, or lack of it; a man wants to propose to his bantering, blasé hostess; and a couple in love, one absent-minded, the other forgetful, tries to concentrate long enough to get married.

One of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen wrote widely on his music and on his beliefs. This is the first edition of his early journalism and provides both the original French text and an English translation. The writing in this volume dates from the 1930s, before the composer gained the international reputation that he and his music now enjoy. The pieces he wrote range from reviews of individual performances to essays on particular works or composers and articles that discuss more general themes such as sincerity of expression in music. Many of the articles included in this collection are new to the Messiaen bibliography, and others are available here for the first time in English. A number are, as Broad describes them, 'quietly shocking' in that they force us to reappraise certain aspects of the composer such as his role in La Jeune France, and his wider participation in the debates of his time. This edition, therefore, represents a new source for understanding Messiaen and provides a fascinating glimpse of the composer in the early part of his career.

The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville places Tocqueville's political though in the context of his time and place, and shows why his ideas defy easy classification. Responding to the twentieth-century tendency to impose anachronistic political categories on Tocqueville, Roger Boesche reminds us that like Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, and other writers of his generation, he was a nineteenth-century Frenchman reacting to contemporary French concerns, aspirations, and anxieties.