This is quite a large book – 660 pages, and I was given a copy by Keith of Warwick Books on Friday evening as the shop was closing. Such is its power of fascination that by Sunday evening, I had read most of it. It’s genuinely one of those ‘can’t put it down’ books: hugely entertaining, impressively learned, really well written, in all a stonkingly good read. The Sunday Times calls it , “Tremendously entertaining”, whilst the Mail on Sunday says it is “Relentlessly and energetically rude”. Which may be typical Mail hyperbole, because it is not so much rude as immaculately researched and light-heartedly written.

The book begins with the Norman Conquest, which the author is keen to point out was a Norman (really a type of Viking, I suppose) rather than a French victory, and goes right up to the present day and a state visit to the United Kingdom by diminutive President Sarkozy, taking in some fascinating and at times slightly scurrilous stuff about WWI and II. In between there are ten centuries of what the French suspect to have been one long campaign by Perfidious Albion to irritate, annoy and infuriate them.

The English and the French are clearly members of the same family, because only members of the same family can get on each other’s nerves so much, and so deliberately, and so protractedly. Only members of the same family can at the same time love and hate one another so completely.

A great book. I loved it.