1000 Years of Annoying the French

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I enjoyed it and laughed out loud fairly frequently, but it's definitely more of a comedy routine than a true historical resource. 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. I ask my colleagues to consider urgently whether we should not now eliminate de Gaulle as a political force.

1000 Years of Annoying the French - Google Books

At times the book suffers from this kind of reasoning, but these are rather spots on a further well-investigated book.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. 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). It's to be hoped he's written a similar book from a French perspective, given that he now lives and works in Paris! The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV. The chapters come with delightful sub-headings, such as "In India and Tahiti: France Gets Lost In Paradise: A selection of historical Frenchmen lose India, fail to notice Australia and give sexually transmitted diseases to Pacific islanders" and "How Britain Killed Off the Last French Royals: And the Victorians said, 'It was an accident, honest.

1000 Years of Annoying the French (Paperback) - Waterstones

I realize that any book that gives a balanced view of history is going to irritate French people a lot. I found the bits about the channel tunnel and entering the EU particularly interesting, because those are bits that I really knew very little about and -- given Brexit -- are quite timely. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of the history that exists between England and France - and essential for anyone who collects fascinating trivia. The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal. 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.But then, here's a thing I wouldn't have ever forgiven, were I de Gaulle: the sinking by Britain of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir (Oran), which killed 1,295 Frenchmen (not "over 1,250 French sailors"). 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. 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? It’s a thousand years worth of conflicts between the British and the French, where the British author pokes fun at the French from start to finish.

:: Stephen Clarke :: Book 1000 Years of Annoying the French

To give the simplest of examples – go into the British Embassy in Paris, and what do you see in the first anteroom you enter?The War Cabinet had the final word, and Churchill agreed to Britain’s continued championing of de Gaulle. 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. Sure thing, the style is the same pleasant one, but the mocking goes too far: one could make similar derisive assertions about everything British, and how would that sound to the perfidious Albion? At first, the murder scene appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her.