Quotes from Stephen Clarke

Verrazzano must have been turning in his grave. (Except that he didn't have one because he'd been eaten.)

Lucky hard-ons are bio-degradable, I thought, because I was throwing a lot them away.

Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman came into closer contact, and the linguistic survival techniques on both sides led to the emergence of a supple, adaptable language in which you could invent or half-borrow words and didn't have to worry so much about whether your sentences had the right verb endings or respected certain strict rules of word order and style (as this sentence proves). The result was the earliest form of what would become English.

Faced with this endless British troublemaking, Napoleon was, in Bonapartist French eyes, like a kung fu master, meditating peacefully on his prayer mat about progress and democracy while a gang of irritating English boys threw acorns at him, finally forcing him to get up and give them a slap.

In French eyes, it was of course doubly wrong to execute a beautiful woman.

Napoleon recalled his dismay at seeing 'mountains of swirling red flames, like huge ocean waves, exploding up into the sky of fire, then sinking into the sea of flames below'.

People's voices change a lot when they speak a different language.

And to everyone at Susanna Lea's agency for their role in making this whole histoire possible. 'The English, by nature, always want to fight their neighbours for no reason, which is why they all die badly.' From the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, written during the Hundred Years War

Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.

In short, Normandy owed its existence to an Englishman who deflected invaders away from Britain and over to France. An auspicious start.

Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.

If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.

there is a French version of the story, and a true one.

There's no room for human rights in a government waiting room.

When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in 'normal' French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won't be able to understand

it must have been hard making a silent movie about a girl who hears voices.)

Calling a tenth- or eleventh-century Norman a Frenchman would have been a bit like telling a Glaswegian he's English, and we all know how dangerous that can be.

It was Voltaire who said that 'in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.' The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal.

She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn't decide in the end if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs

This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be 'Cray-see' and Waterloo 'Watt-air-loh'), with Agincourt ('Ah-zan-coor') we even get the spelling wrong.

James II's second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books)

Philippe also brought along musicians - mainly trumpeters and drummers - to scare the enemy. Even then, French music was known to terrify the English.

We Brits feel no resentment about 'losing' our American colonies. We're quite fond of independent Americans, and see them as distant cousins who can't spell our language properly. We've cooperated with America pretty amicably on projects like liberating Europe and inventing pop music. And we have no desire whatsoever to try and govern Texas.

He could have had "dull" tattooed across his forehead, but that would have made him too exciting.