Ranging from the Faubourg Saint-Germain of the OrlÉanist monarchy to the trenches of the Western Front, Gordon Wright's clutch of 'Brief Lives' offers the reader an impressionistic voyage across the nineteenth century by means of some of the period's more intriguing, though generally less celebrated, personalities. The ten subjects of these highly compressed biographical sketches represent the worlds of art, politics and letters, each apparently selected for the wider cultural insight they provide as well as for the inherent interest of their individual stories.