This volume, written in honour of Philip Thody, Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Leeds, reflects his own wide-ranging contribution to the field of French Studies. It brings together eighteen original essays by leading scholars, exploring a variety of interrelated literary, philosophical and political issues which will interest all students of French culture. While some chapters offer comparative studies of French and English writers, others analyse the links between major figures of French literature and thought, or those between the cultural, social and political worlds where the twentieth-century French intellectual plays such an important role in the development of ideas. The volume contains studies of the novel, poetry, drama, thought and cinema and covers a range of subjects including civil law in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth-century campaign for abolition of the slave trade, attitudes to Occupation and Liberation, ideological debate after the Second World War, and the problems of life in the modern city and the banlieue.