1000 Years of Annoying the French

Product Information

Stephen Clarke takes a penetrating look into those murky depths, guiding us through all the times when Britain and France have been at war – or at least glowering at each other across the English Channel. Stephen Clarke takes a penetrating look into those murky depths, guiding us through all the times when Britain and France have been at war - or at least glowering at each other. Sometimes they’re right – we have done some nasty things to the French in the past – but often they’re hilariously wrong, and I have tried to set the record straight. Deals with some areas of history which I enjoy reading about, and some areas that I'm not familliar with. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Maybe it was because that was where my interest lay more in the earlier periods of history but I found the last part of the book with De Gaulle fairly uninteresting, though I didn't know about any of it really. While whenever the British won, the British author can’t help but gloat over the British superiority and kick down on the French. The author also concludes this book by saying: “we can proudly affirm that, right down at DNA level, we’re not the same as the French. Of course, there are parts of the book that tackle the issues of our war time differences and how such things are stitched into the fabric of our two nations. The author is British but has lived on both sides of the channel, and he lobs potshots in each direction.Images of dramatic encounters with les Français flashed before my eyes, until it got me to the point that I could identify the main cause: a traumatic experience from my childhood in which an extremely fat monsieur shouted at me for not having a ticket for the carousel.

Although history is the opinion of whoever decides to interpret certain selected facts a certain way, it’s helpful to know that there are alternative ways to interpret facts so that the French don’t get the glory for many things they think they’re responsible for. During World War II, the British hated their French allies almost as much as they hated their Soviet allies. In 2004, he self-published A Year in the Merde, a comic novel skewering contemporary French society. I enjoyed it and laughed out loud fairly frequently, but it's definitely more of a comedy routine than a true historical resource. To give the simplest of examples – go into the British Embassy in Paris, and what do you see in the first anteroom you enter?

You know what, I’m going to let the book's introduction speak for itself – I think I explained it a bit more clearly there. The one that thakes you from 94% to 51% of the way through the book in a single forward page turn is impressive. I could go on stating the other way that the Guernsey resistance did a terrible job on blowing up railways (do they have a railway there?