From Blenheim & Waterloo to ` Up Yours, Delors` & ` Hop Off You Frogs`, the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension & suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration & affection. In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France & Britain have spent much of that time as allies
- an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive & as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace & war, for good & ill, has shaped the modern world, from North America to India in the eighteenth century, in Africa, the Middle East & South East Asia during the nineteenth & twentieth centuries, & it is still shaping Europe today. This magisterial book, by turns provocative & delightful, always fascinating, tells the rich & complex story of the relationship over three centuries, from the beginning of the great struggle for mastery during the reign of Louis XIV to the second Iraq War & the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars & battles, ententes & alliances, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex & music. Its cast ranges from William & Mary to Tony Blair, from Voltaire to Eric Cantona; its sources from ambassadorial dispatches to police reports, from works of philosophy to tabloid newspapers, from guidebooks to cartoons & films. It`s a book which brings both British humour & Gallic panache to the story of these two countries, in sickness & in health, for richer for poorer, in victory & in defeat, in dominance & in decline.