1000 Years of Annoying the French

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Once journalists get their hands on them,those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms.

This is a great introduction to anybody wanting to understand the peculiar relationship between two countries separated by a 30 mile stretch of water and 1000 years of colourful history. 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.Matter of fact, I already gave it to his companion a minute before, but probable miscommunication (which is rather a French condition if I follow this book) made the man scream words that I couldn't understand (though I guess they had to do with cheese, wine and misplaced chauvinism). Someone who would tax them half to death but who might just keep them alive long enough to pay the taxes – a lot like modern governments, in fact.

But there’s only a handful of sentences mentioning that the British were there to fill their pockets too. The reading of it could not be any better, the writing is witty, and it is an absolute gem of a book, one of the few I can see myseof listening to time after time. Justin Edwards's french accent was brilliantly deployed on all French quotes, to highlight their (French) annoyance. 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?On hindsight, this is a really good book to get yourself familiar with the history of these two countries, even if you're not from either of them. In it they will find a full supply of delightful anecdotes, giving them all the amunitions they need to silence the arrogant French. In 2004, he self-published A Year in the Merde, a comic novel skewering contemporary French society. 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. And now it’s time to put our differences aside and start working together as one people, living together on the same planet and facing the same problems.

It’s pretty comprehensive, coming in at just under 650 pages, and it’s not all as good as the rest of it. 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. and «There was some traffic in the other direction, the most famous example being ‘My Way’, which is an English-language adaptation of the French song ‘Comme d’habitude’ (‘As Usual’) by Claude François.

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. After working as a journalist for a French