When archaeologist John Henry Phillips volunteered with a charity that took D-Day veterans back to Normandy, due to an administrative error he found himself without a hotel room and reliant on the generosity of one of the veterans who had a spare bed. That veteran was Patrick Thomas - and it was an encounter that would change both their lives forever. Patrick's landing craft, LCH 185, had led the first wave into Sword Beach on D-Day, and stayed off Normandy until the 25th June when an acoustic mine sent it to the seabed along with most of the crew. His story transfixed John, and the resulting search for the shipwreck was to consume him. Jumping back and forwards in time, between vivid descriptions of the final days on board LCH 185 and John's thrilling search to find the shipwreck, The Search is an emotional story of a devastating time in history, an unlikely, life-changing friendship and a quest to honour a wartime home and family lost over seventy-five years ago.

This original and far-reaching study looks afresh at the involvement of the Catholic Church in the cultural life of France in the seventeenth century. Professor Phillips provides a comprehensive overview of art and literature, education, ideas and censorship, and he focuses on the Church as a reforming and reformed institution in the context of the Counter-Reformation. The strength of his synthesis, the first of its kind in English, lies in the breadth of its concerns and in its combination of social, religious and intellectual history.

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France brings together the social, religious and intellectual history of the Grand Siecle and focuses on the involvement of the Church in a variety of cultural domains, including literature, art, censorship and ideas. It explores the limits as well as the extent of the Church's influence, especially in its attempt to impose orthodoxy in all areas and on all sections of society. Given that orthodoxy determines the believer's inclusion or exclusion from the Church, thus implying the notion of boundaries in a context of constraint, the study is conceived according to a number of spaces. The notion of space is sometimes interpreted literally, e.g. Port-Royal, the school and the church building, and sometimes metaphorically, e.g. orthodoxy itself, science and theology. The book also deals with religious attitudes to libertinage, atheism and deism, and with aspects of French Protestantism.