Most war histories are written by men about men. So it is good to read a history of wartime Paris which focusses on the women at last. Meticulous research has produced a wide ranging narrative. Sebba weaves together the stories of many women: resisters, collaborators, fashion designers, society hostesses, deportees, Jews, mothers struggling to feed their families, and maybe hiding false ID cards in the baby’s pram, against the background of Paris occupied by German men. Sebba does not judge – indeed she asks how can any of us judge- the compromises, the risks and the sacrifices all these women made. And she goes further, taking the effects of the war into the post war period, and helping us understand why still today there are murky depths no one wants to probe. The disdain for the returning deportees, the neglected orphans, the condemnation of the “collaborateurs horizontales” and the wholesale elimination of women from the history of the war. Only in 2015 were two women Resistants finally admitted to the Pantheon of Grands Hommes. Only now is the role of women in the Resistance being properly acknowledged. When I wrote my own book, Love and War in the Pyrenees, about the Second World War in the South, I asked a French friend (Ginette Vincendeau, film historian, also cited in Les Parisiennes) whether I had any right to explore this sensitive subject. She encouraged me, saying that they would not do it themselves. Anne Sebba has done it for them. I salute her.