MATTHEW COBB is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester. He has translated five books from French into English, and spent most of his adult life as a researcher in Paris, before returning to the UK in 2002. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and writes regular magazine pieces for the Journal of Experimental Biology.

THE RESISTANCE
The French Fight Against the Nazis

Winner of the Franco-British Society's Enid McLeod Book Prize 2009

Cobb comes perhaps closer than any other historian to explaining why the Resistance matters – THE SPECTATOR

A fabulous book, painstakingly researched, even-handed and dripping with poignancy… A good book about the Resistance has long been overdue – THE HERALD

Impeccably sourced… A fine piece of work, illustrated with excellent photographs… a successful tribute to extraordinary men and women – THE SUNDAY TIMES

Heart-wrenching detail, bringing to life the bravery, horror and hope that filled the lives of the Resistants – MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS

Makes the excitement and danger of the period palpable, and allows a greater understanding of what it must have been like to be involved in such a dramatic conflict – IRISH TIMES

Matthew Cobb has pulled off the very difficult feat of capturing both the complexity and the high drama of the French resistance. Everyone with an interest in modern France will learn something from reading his work – Professor Richard Vinen, author of THE UNFREE FRENCH: Life under the Occupation and A HISTORY IN FRAGMENTS: Europe in the Twentieth Century

The French resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of French men and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence.

Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently released archival material, THE RESISTANCE uses dramatic personal stories to take the reader on one of the great adventures of the twentieth century. The tale begins with the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940, and shatters the myth of a unified Resistance created by General de Gaulle. The Resistance was made in France, not London. De Gaulle never understood the Resistance, and sought to use, dominate and channel it to his own ends. In response, the Resistance struggled to stop de Gaulle and the Allies from taking control of their movement. Brave men and women set up organizations, only to be betrayed or hunted down by the Nazis, and to die in front of the firing squad or in the concentration camps. Eventually, through the determination of Frenchman Jean Moulin, the Resistance was unified. But the French were not alone: without the sacrifice of British Special Operations Executive agents and RAF pilots flying into makeshift airstrips on moonlit nights, there would have been no radio contact with London, little money and fewer arms.

Sometimes, resistance involved blowing up trains and factories, or killing Nazi soldiers. But much of the work of the Resistance was more prosaic, although equally dangerous. People handed out leaflets outside stations. They produced underground newspapers. They scrawled 'V' for victory on the walls. They sabotaged machinery with sand or a well-placed spanner. They went on strike. They participated in illegal demonstrations. They fought.

In 1943, thousands of young men took to the hills (the maquis) to avoid being sent to work in Nazi Germany. The question of who would control these men – de Gaulle, the Allies or the Resistance – took on a crucial importance after D-Day, when hundreds of thousands of Resistance fighters harassed the retreating Nazi forces and helped two million Allied troops liberate France. Liberation threatened to transform itself into Revolution – the outcome that both De Gaulle and the Allies feared most, and did their utmost to prevent. Victorious, De Gaulle was able to neuter the Resistance, turning its revolutionary force into part of the establishment. Over the next half-century, the true story of the Resistance got blurred and distorted, its heroes and conflicts were forgotten as the movement became a myth.

By turns exciting, tragic and insightful, THE RESISTANCE touches on some of the strongest themes in life – courage, self-sacrifice, betrayal and struggle. In telling the story through the actions and words of the people who dared to defy the Nazis, and those who failed to do so, it leads readers to look deep inside themselves and ask: What would I have done?

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (UK)
Pub date: 1 June 2009
Length: 416 pages

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth

 

THE EGG AND SPERM RACE
The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth

Winner of the Zoological Society of London's 2008 Prize for Communicating
Science (The Thomson/Zoological Record Prize)

It is a story as relevant today as it was in its own time, and Matthew Cobb tells it with great scholarship and tremendous panache – Tim Birkhead, author of PROMISCUITY and THE RED CANARY

A fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities – Lisa Jardine, SUNDAY TIMES

Lively… You can almost smell the formaldehyde on the page – FINANCIAL TIMES

A ripping yarn – MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS

Where do we come from? Where do animals come from? For thousands of years we had no idea how living things were created – great thinkers like Aristotle and Hippocrates had attempted to explain what became know as the problem of ‘generation’, but none of them had the tools or the insight to solve the mystery. The result was a wealth of weird and wonderful ideals about the components necessary to create new life – blood, ‘vapours’, invisible particles in the air. It was widely accepted that animals could sometimes produce different species, for example; the notion that two sheep can only ever make another sheep is a surprisingly modern idea.

THE EGG AND SPERM RACE is the story of the exciting, largely forgotten decade during the seventeenth century when a group of young men – Jan Swammerdam, the son of a Protestant apothecary, Nils Stensen (also known as Steno), a Danish anatomist who first discovered the human tear duct, Reinier de Graaf, the attractive and brilliant son of a rich and successful Catholic architect, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught draper – dared to challenge thousands of years of orthodox thinking about where life comes from.

By meticulous experimentation, dissection, and observation with the newly invented microscope, they showed that like breeds like, that all animals come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation and that there are millions of tiny, wriggling ‘eels’ in semen. But their ultimate inability to fully understand the evidence that was in front of them led to a fatal mistake. As a result, the final leap in describing the process of reproduction – which would ultimately give birth to the science of genetics – took nearly two centuries for humanity to achieve.

Including previously untranslated documents, THE EGG AND SPERM RACE interweaves the personal stories of these scientists against a backdrop of the Dutch ‘golden age’. It is a riveting account of the audacious men who swept away old certainties and provided the foundation for much of our current understanding of the living world.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (UK)/Bloomsbury (US)*
Pub date: 3 April 2006 (UK)/8 August 2006 (US)
Length: 332 pages

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (De Bezige Bij)

*Published in the US as GENERATION