That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the PresentA brilliantly original account--narrated from both sides--of the love-hate relationship between Britain and France that began in the time of Louis XIV and shows no sign of abating. "That Sweet Enemy "brings both British wit (Robert Tombs is a British historian) and Gallic panache (Isabelle Tombs is a French historian) to bear on three centuries of the history of Britain and France. The authors take us from Waterloo to Chirac's slandering of British cooking, charting the cross-channel entanglement and its unparalleled breadth of cultural, economic and political influence. They illuminate the complexity of the relationship--rivalry, enmity, misapprehension and loathing mixed with envy, admiration and genuine affection--and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world, from North America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and is still shaping Europe today. They make clear that warfare between the two countries often went hand in hand with hardy, if hidden, strains of anglophilia and francophilia; conversely, though France and Britain were allies for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been an alliance almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the previous generations of warfare. Wonderfully written--acute, witty, consistently surprising--"That Sweet Enemy" is a triumph: an eye-opener for the experts, and a feast for the general reader. |
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Contents
STRUGGLE | 3 |
Britain at the Heart of Europe 16881748 | 20 |
The End of the Beginning | 39 |
Copyright | |
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That Sweet Enemy: The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present Isabelle Tombs,Robert Tombs No preview available - 2010 |
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