French and British history overlaps so much during the last thousand years, it’s impossible to separate one from the other.

As tongue in cheek as the title sounds, this is an informative history book that charts 1000 years of Anglo-French mutual adoration loathing.It's also very informative, although not necessarily in the manner of a traditional history book, with several rather obscure historical events being focused upon. A whole country being invaded by their ‘archenemy’ or a few islands that were given up with some shoulder shrugging, well sentiment could be a bit different, don’t you think? France also blames the treacherous Anglais for killing Joan of Arc, but she was burnt after being captured by French soldiers and tried as a witch by Parisian monks. 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? 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.

Who knew that modern champagne was invented in England, that Dom Perignon tried to remove the fizziness from the French stuff because the bottles kept exploding whereas the English went crazy for it and the fizzier the better? Despite it being a whimsical ride for the most part, it did drag from time to time, and I was glad to get it over with. On the other hand, I am French, and I have discovered at my expense that this book does exactly what it says on the cover: it annoyed me. 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.But it’s never mentioned how long the British colonial wars lasted for, or even how many of them there were.