num_pages: 816
description: From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs' the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy admiration and affection. In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace and war for good and ill has shaped the modern world from North America to India in the eighteenth century in Africa the Middle East and South East Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it is still shaping Europe today. This magisterial book by turns provocative and delightful always fascinating tells the rich and 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 and the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars and battles ententes and alliances but also of food fashion sport literature sex and music. Its cast ranges from William and 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 and films. It's a book which brings both British humour and Gallic panache to the story of these two countries in sickness and in health for richer for poorer in victory and in defeat in dominance and in decline.
language: English
title: That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship
publisher: Vintage