A great book about an impressive person. One can learn much about not only the French Revolution, napoleonic era, and rise of liberal values directly pertinent to modern times, but also about general foreign policy, political resourcefulness, and unfaltering pursuit of pleasure.

One thing to keep in mind before reading this is that a baseline knowledge of the times is helpful in understanding the book.

Great book about Talleyrand. Easy to read and full of interesting anecdotes taken from the memoirs of diferent contemporaries.
It has a very positive bias, and goes out of the way to portrait the main attributes of Talleyrand personality.

I really enjoyed this examination of Talleyrand from an early twentieth-century viewpoint. Even the errors of fact are in tune with what little was understood about the man, who had stipulated that his memoirs must not be published for thirty years after his death. Unfortunately, the executors all managed to die off, one after another, shortly before the date, with the result that Talleyrand's memoirs did not appear until nearly at the end of the nineteenth century--and because they turned out to contain little of the salacious detail people had hoped for, they immediately pretty much sank into obscurity.

I wish my French was good enough to read his thoughts as he wrote them. But it isn't, so I read around him, so to speak; my interest in the guy began decades ago when I became aware that his name popped up during the Ancien Regime, during the Revolution (in fact, during the several stages of it), during Napoleon's time, and after. How had he managed to survive--to flourish? When I delved into the Congress of Vienna and read about Talleyrand representing France--the defeated enemy--and causing everyone to shift paradigm from allies against France to 'let's design a balanced Europe' I began looking for stuff from my limited vantage.

Duff Cooper's book is satisfying in that Cooper understood diplomacy and statesmanship of that period. It's an elegant, leisurely read. Let me leave off with a nifty quotation"

It was a very different country that this lover of England was revisiting in 1830 from that which he had left in 1794. Never perhaps have thirty-six years effected so complete a change in the outward aspect and in the inward mind of a whole nation. It is hardly too much to say that the complete process of alteration from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century had taken place in that period.

He had known the London of Horace Walpole and he came back to the London of Charles Greville. When he was last there Pitt and Fox had been at the height of their powers; now the young Disraeli was already older than Pitt had been when he became Prime Minister, and the young Gladstone was coming of age.

He had left the London of knee-breeches and powdered hair, he returned to the London of frock-coats and top-hats. White's Club, down the steps of which he would have been kicked as a rascally Jacobin in 1794, elected him an honorary member. The famous bow window had been built over those steps in the interval and had already seen its greatest days, for the brief reign of Brummel was over, and the dandies of the Regency were no more.

Boswell had been alive when he was last in London. The whole life-work of Keats, Shelley, and Byron had taken place during his absence, and in this, the year of his return, the first publication of Tennyson saw the light. . .

Wow, this book is something else. After having read about Napoleon I thought it was best to read about the second most famous Frenchman from the Revolution (and onwards). First, the writing here is just superb, rhetoric is used to its fullest potential and the insights that Cooper brings are wondrously wrought. It puts Napoleon in a much harsher light than you would expect, and builds Talleyrand up as the true ideal man of the times. To be consistent is the lesson here, but at the same time to hedge your bets! Highly recommended if only for the writing.