i'm thinking of boris johnson's behaviour with the court and his language. It has won him a huge amount of support inside britain, but from the outside, it doesn't work very well at all. So interesting, we may well come on to that. But i am also interested in the parallel, going back to clare jackson's book, about the jacobean era,. One of the themes there is that british rulers of one kind or another are doing things which don't make any sense to continental observers. I think people are perplexed, not just in france, across the continent and elsewhere, at how this man gets away with it
‘Devil-Land’ – that was how foreign observers viewed England in the 17th century: a ‘failed state’ torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. The historian Clare Jackson recounts this stormy and radical era through the eyes of outsiders across the Channel. But she tells Andrew Marr that the country’s turbulence also bred great creativity and curiosity about the wider world.
The Anglo-French journalist Benedicte Paviot is the UK correspondent of France 24. She explores how the French view Britain today. From Brexit to the government’s pursuit of ‘Global Britain’ and the new Australia/UK/US defence pact, contemporary French neighbours often look on with hostility and bemusement.
Fintan O’Toole is an Irish journalist and polemicist who has spent much of his career commenting on Britain from the other side of the water. But in his latest book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, he turns his attention to Ireland since his birth in 1958. It’s another story of great turbulence and rebellion, from underdevelopment, domination by the Church and a sectarian civil war in the North, to struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms.
Producer: Katy Hickman