'As someone who teaches a course on the idea of Europe, I appreciate how the author chronicles the formulation and contestation of ideas about identity and place with well-researched concrete examples. I look forward to adding the book to the required reading for the course. The vignettes are intriguing: the story of exiles from Franco’s Spain in Paris; the work of the scholar of the Arab world Jacques Berques; and the work of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photos of Paris are iconic. Each vignette clearly shows how cultural spaces in Paris were implicated in aspects of Europeanism and raised issues about who constituted an insider and outsider.'Kolleen M. Guy, University of Texas at San Antonio, H-France