Includes bibliographical references (p. 741-772) and index. Originally published: London : W. Heinemann, 2006.
Contents:
Britain joins Europe -- Thinking, pleasing, seeing -- The sceptre of the world -- The revenger's tragedy -- Ideas and bayonets -- Changing the face of the world -- Plucking the fruits of peace -- The war that never was -- Decadence and regeneration -- The war to end wars -- Losing the peace -- Finest hours, darkest years -- Losing empires, seeking roles -- Ever closer disunion.
Summary:
"A 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 sigh 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 Chiracʼs 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. From the book jacket."--From source other than the Library of Congress Includes information on anglophobia, British Army, French Army, arts, Tony Blair, Winston Churchill, French economy, European integration, food, Charles de Gaulle, invasions and attempts, Ireland, Jacobites, London, Napoleon I, Napoleon III, British Navy, French Navy, Paris, William Pitt, religious conflict, revolutions, Scotland, William Shakespeare, sport, Charles Maurice de Tallyrand, Margaret Thatcher, trade, travel and tourism, treaties, United States of America, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, wars, Duke of Wellington, women, workers, etc.
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