LA MANCHE

That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Presentby Robert Tombs

Sometime intimate foes, sometime bitter allies, France and Britainhave for centuries largely defined themselves in relation to eachother. This remarkably inventive, stylish, and audacious worktraces the history of that infernal couple, from the seventeenthcentury to the present. Probing national culture and sensibilityas well as war, diplomacy, and finance, the authors (husband andwife -- he's a Cambridge don who has written a pathbreaking studyof the Paris Commune; she's a French-born historian of Britainwho works at the Foreign Office) assay the entire 300-plus yearsin their nearly 800-page history, but they focus on what scholarscall the "Second Hundred Years' War": the period of intermittentconflict between 1689 and 1815, which started when William IIIsummoned a "Grand Alliance" to thwart the Sun King's bid for Europeanmastery and ended with Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, a defeatthat permanently blunted and diverted France's power and internationalambitions