PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Antoine Lilti is Professor of History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and former editor-in-chief of the journal Annales.
Lilti s achievement is highly impressive. He provides a new perspective on the transformations of Western culture in the age of revolutions, and on the genesis of modern notions of selfhood and personal authenticity. And he reminds us that even as we laugh at contemporary celebrity culture, we need to take it seriously, and not merely as an excrescence or a pathology, but as a constituent element of political and cultural modernity. David A. Bell, Princeton University With The Invention of Celebrity, Antoine Lilti has established himself as one of the most significant and talented historians of eighteenth-century France It is an imaginative study, at once audacious and theoretically grounded, that establishes celebrity as an object of historical analysis and lays the groundwork for further studies of the phenomenon. Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London
