That Sweet Enemy: the French and the British from the Sun King to the present Isabelle and Robert Tombs William Heinemann, 780pp, £25 ISBN 0434008672

The étude comparatif is a demanding genre: two or more topics have to be brought into relation with each other in a way that promotes understanding by contrast while also illuminating the hidden as well as the more obvious connections that made the exercise plausible in the first place. In the case of a historical work, the narrative flow is always in danger of being deflected by the banality of "On the one hand . . . yet on the other . . ."

The Franco-British story extends over a millennium of cross-Channel currents in culture and politics that have thrown up among the flotsam and jetsam a mésentente that is often less than cordiale. Les rosbifs have a history of fascination with the grenouilles who, in turn, are more indifferent than the British imagine to the thoughts that are entertained about them on the island to the north. Much British Francophilia is in fact a commentary on how Britain sees itself - which is why these imaginings strike an insistently Arcadian note while also delving deep in-to resources of self-resentment. Life over there is, for many, how life used to be here before turbocharged techno modernity took us all on a helter-skelter ride that is alternately scary and exhilarating. France, by contrast, can be usefully turned into an imagined land of lost content - a Lyonesse submerged by the waves.

The historian tracing the story of how these two countries have understood themselves by looking at each other needs, therefore, to be well informed right across the centuries of this mixed-up relationship. But in looking at such an incongruous pairing, the chronicler also needs to be exceptionally clear-sighted about two nations that like to think they have a special relationship with manifest destiny. Conceit unites the British with the French in the world's eyes - which is why this book's theme is one that has long been in need of its historian.

Isabelle and Robert Tombs are well qualified to approach this daunting but exhilarating subject. His English scholarship has already produced one of the best studies of the Paris Commune of 1871 - the event that really launched modern socialism as well as France's Third Republic. And her Gallic literary flair for the illuminating aperçu shines through in her own contribution to this admirable and consistently entertaining work.

One of the book's best features is the occasional suspension of the narrative when the two authors engage in a dialogue offering differing views on the great subjects that still divide the two countries' inhabitants and historians - such as Napoleon's legacy. The Tombses agree to forceful and elegant effect that the Napoleonic wars were really the culmination of a century of intermittent warfare that started when William III of England launched his military and diplomatic "Grand Alliance" in the late 17th century. Isabelle Tombs sees this second "hundred years war" as originating in a British aggression that resulted from the predominance of banking and commercial interests in the country's domestic and emergent colonial policy. Her husband, veering towards Whiggery, takes the line that Britain was reacting against a consistent attempt by France - "the most bellicose state in Europe . . . to impose a European, and eventually a global, hegemony". It's a familiar debate when discussing pre-1914 Wilhelmine Germany, and it's good to be reminded of this earlier French dimension to a constant European theme.

That Sweet Enemy takes up its story in the mid-17th century, by which time the lines of communication, abuse, suspicion, envy and admiration were well established. And although this is already a very long book, its synoptic sweep would have benefited from at least a prologue on the medieval antecedents to the topic. But it is certainly the grand siècle dominated by Louis XIV that exemplifies the main thrust of the diplomatic story: an aim of consolidation on France's "natural" eastern boundary along the Rhine (thereby aiming at a recreation of Gaul, according to Louis's enemies), contrast-ing with an English policy of divide and rule in relation to the Continental powers (leading to the French view that Albion was forever perfide). Napoleon's career, as the authors show, was but the resumption of this strategic goal, toppling over into megalomaniacal self-destruction when, like Hitler, he found that he could sustain his position only by a consistent policy of conquest.

War, diplomacy and politics, treaties, revolutions and rebellions naturally enough crowd the pages of this magnificent book, which teems with life and incident. But it is also a study in culture, sensibility and national myth-making. Treading its alert way through the "isms" of the classical, romantic and surreal, this book shows how the taste and genius of individual French and British artists have created the currents of thought that unite as much as they divide. It is a prodigious achievement.

Hywel Williams's most recent book is Britain's Power Elites: the rebirth of a ruling class (Constable & Robinson)

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