The centuries-old, love-hate relationship with our closest neighbour has spawned a plethora of myths & stereotypes. In recent years our stock of received wisdom about the French
- land of the sophisticated lover, the wine-fuelled lunch, the gitane-puffing philosopher, the hairy female armpit & the rebarbatively squalid toilet
- has been replenished by a new generation of lifestyle myths: that French women don't get fat, that French children don't throw food, that their countryside has been colonized by Boden-clad, Volvo-driving Brits. In THEY EAT HORSES, DON'T THEY?, Piu Das Eatwell explores the background to, & the contemporary evidence for, 45 such myths. She finds that many of them are simply false, & that even those that are broadly true are rather more complicated than at first sight. In the course of her thorough
- & thoroughly entertaining
- investigations, we discover there is more to our enigmatic Gallic neighbour than 365 types of cheese, & that the reality of modern French life is very different from the myths that we create about it.