Pour l'américaine à Paris

A good book," as George III wrote to Edmund Burke on the publication in 1790 of Reflections on the French Revolution, "a very good book, and every gentleman should have a copy." Substitute the word "undergraduate" for that of "gentleman", and you have a very appropriate blurb.

You could also add "teacher of French" since I am sure I am not alone in never being able to remember quite what the words in the acronym Assedic stand for, and did not know before reading this book that Ravel existed. The former is the Association pour l'emploi dans l'industrie et le commerce , the organisation that provides unemployment insurance and arranges for you to get your money when you are out of a job. The latter is another acronym - the French are very fond of them, and call them sigles - and stands for Recensement automatisé des voeux des élèves . You use it when applying for a place at a university or any institution of higher education that is not une grande école .

These are fairly typical entries in a book whose authors set out, as they put it, "to provide a snapshot of the France of the mid and late-1990s''. Another way of putting it is that they enable you to understand what the newspapers are going on about when you have not lived there for a while. It has the additional advantage that you can easily slip it into your pocket.

I was particularly pleased to see the term specificité , as in la specificité français , the expression invoked, as Eleanor and Michel Levieux put it, to "explain/justify/urge French resistance to l'hégémonie américaine , the overwhelming influence of all things American''. The entries are rather slanted to a transatlantic audience - the Levieux are a Franco-American couple - but this is no bad thing. It reminds the English of how small a place they now have in the French scheme of things, a fact that explains why there would probably not be a market for a comparable volume about the UK addressed to a French audience.

Philip Thody is emeritus professor of French, University of Leeds.