Zeldin studies the problems of modern society in light of demonstrating how individuals pay attention to, or ignore, the experience of previous generations and cultures. Some of his examples are how people have acquired immunity to loneliness, how older fears give rise to new fears, and why people choose a way of life and what they do when it does not wholly satisfy them.

"Do You Want Better Conversations with your lover, your colleagues at work, your family, friends or strangers, or yourself? Conversation explains what kind of talk charmed and excited people in the past and why we talk differently today. It explores the art and the history of conversation and how it can be the key to a happier, more interesting future. It shows how women have changed the ways lovers speak, how families avoid silence or boredom, how our work can damage or improve the way we converse and what role there is for the tongue-tied and shy. This book will enable us to see more clearly what we want to talk about and what conversation can do to our lives. Conversation began as a series of talks broadcast on the BBC."

This is a history of the French which tries to explain their idiosyncrasies, enthusiasms and prejudices. It goes beyond the recital of events to investigate their attitudes and behaviour over an unusually wide range of activities. Volume I scrutinizes the peculiar way of thinking and of talking adopted by the French, their powerful sense of national identity, their ambivalent feelings about foreigners. It shows what it meant to be a Breton or a Provencal, an Alsation or an Auvergnat. Volume II analyses French taste and the role of the artist. It enquires into the quality of life, the French view of happiness, friendship and comfort, humour, reactions to scientific progress, compromises with corruption and superstition. This major reinterpretation of France's achievement as a nation and of the individual experience of the French has taken its place as one of the great works of scholarship on modern France, and now re-appears in two paperback volumes.