A 'deliciously' entertaining read from start to finish - probably the most entertaining history book I've ever read (and I do enjoy a bit of history). Having read Stephen Clarke's 'A Year In The Merde' before this, my experience of reading this one was a quite welcome and pleasant subversion of my expectations - and I do have a penchant for the latter as well. Harold didn’t need to hire expensive lawyers to dream up a credible defence, though – what hostage is going to refuse to take an oath to a man who is holding him hostage? And what jurisdiction did this Norman foreigner have in England?” This book starts with the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, where the Duke of Normandy (which is in France) had a very decisive victory against the British. It is explained that the naming of Normandy came from the Normans (Vikings) who settled there. This is all just to point out that the British may have lost, but not (just) to the French. Though technically, the invading army did come from France. This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the book.

A Finalist for the 2022 James Beard Foundation Cookbook Award and the 2022 IACP Award (International) This is not just a book filled with subtle humour and facts galore, it is a veritable history lesson. Despite the title, it is not an anti-French manifesto, far from it. As well as plenty of passage highlighting reasons to love the French, it reminds us of the many things the world has to thank France for. That said, it also takes time to debunk some myths that the French love to trot out. The fact that le croissant was a Belgian invention is particularly irksome to my French friends. Like everyone else, I always suspected that the mistrust had something to do with 1066, Agincourt, Waterloo and all that, but I felt that most of our battles were too far in the past to have much effect on the present. So I decided to delve into that past and come up with a more accurate answer. A bonus is that the humor is on point most of the times which by itself this saves the book in many cases.

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So from that point of view it gives great pleasure to hit the French with la baguette de l'histoire. Clarke's witty writing helps a lot. But it is not thoughtless bashing, Clarke's book actually hits upon an interesting topic: the way national identities are constructed and how historical events are greatly distorted in that process. We and the other. You could easily write a book about every country in Europe and the ridiculous deviations of history. The most interesting example in this book is obviously (to me) the story of Jeannne D'Arc. It is rather hilarious how the national memory erases the fact that the poor girl was sentenced to death by her own people for wearing trousers. Mon Dieu! If you are really interested in the historical field of national memory I would highly recommend The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm. This book took me a while to finish because, like I do with nonfiction, I dipped in and out of it. While I did know about some periods of the 1000 years it was covering, I wasn't an expert enough to critique the information it provided in the book so I can't comment on the accuracy. However, I liked how the book was split into sections and the actual information was very readable as well. That's preposterous! Churchill never liked de Gaulle (and vice versa)! The only truth is that the Americans wanted to bypass the Général and to establish an Allied (read: "all-American") government in France, but as of Churchill, better read this Associated Press summary: «It’s no secret Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle didn’t like each other. But documents released Tuesday reveal just how deep their antipathy ran with Britain’s prime minister at one point musing about eliminating the French general as a political force. ... Several of the documents indicate that Churchill wanted to withdraw Britain’s support for the man who later became France’s president. ... Churchill, who was in Washington, exchanged memos and telegrams with his Cabinet in London and is shown to agree with U.S. fears that de Gaulle was "too dictatorial" and an Anglophobe. The French leader "hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere," Churchill wrote. ... Churchill wrote in a telegram to his deputy, Clement Attlee, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on May 21, 1943. "I ask my colleagues to consider urgently whether we should not now eliminate de Gaulle as a political force." In another memorandum to Eden, Churchill includes intelligence information that he said described de Gaulle as "thoroughly unfriendly both to Britain and to the United States and that while affecting communist sympathies he had fascist tendencies."»

You don’t have to be a Brit or an Anglophile or even a Francophobe to appreciate this book but it helps. Stephen Clarke takes a potted look at 1000 years of Anglo-French relations from the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 to President Sarkozy’s visit in 2008 and reveals that all of France’s failures in those thousand years were due to the machinations of the Brits and France’s successes (few and far between, according to Clarke) were actually achieved by someone else who was distinctly not French. Is monsieur annoyed by now? Tres bien. To write this, I followed my nose through whole libraries (both online and off), hunting through 1000 years of history to produce a chunky tome that tries to set the record straight about the long tragi-comedy of relations between the French and all us English-speakers. Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil’s Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.” William the Conqueror and Napoleon-the-dwarf (with very little body parts): they weren’t even French.

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Research for The French Revolution and What Went Wrong took him deep into French archives in search of the actual words, thoughts and deeds of the revolutionaries and royalists of 1789. He has now re-emerged to ask modern Parisians why they have forgotten some of the true democratic heroes of the period, and opted to idolize certain maniacs. During World War II, the British hated their French allies almost as much as they hated their Soviet allies. Ten centuries' worth of French historical 'facts' bite the dust as Stephen Clarke looks at what has really been going on since 1066 ... The thing is, this all just feels a bit disproportionate. I mean, like half the countries in the world right now have an independence day to celebrate their independence from the British. That’s something that I do feel could have at least been mentioned a bit more clearly, to balance things out, instead of focusing so much on what the French did wrong. Though I do appreciate that some mistakes the British made during certain conflicts are at least mentioned throughout the book. You learn a lot about the impact of France on the world. In many cases, as the book has a clear anti-French bias (albeit tongue-in-cheek apparently) Clarke takes pains to point out where our common understanding of the influence of France on history is misplaced.

It’s not tactless or provocative – relations couldn’t be better between the British Embassy and their French hosts – it’s simply there. Just as the battle between the sexes will never end (we hope), neither will the millennium-old rivalry between the French and anyone who happens to be born speaking English.

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Autumn 1945 - Off the east coast of England, a Japanese sub surfaces, unloads its mysterious cargo, then blows itself to pieces. In short, Normandy owed its existence to an Englishman who deflected invaders away from Britain and over to France. An auspicious start.”