There are just so many diplomatic entourages arriving, often with 80 to a sort of hundred people in its where re we gong to put up the danish. And they're all sending back remarkably vivid and and pretty pointed analyses of what's going on in the first of all, the tudor in the jacobean court. I mean, if there isn't such a thing as an tif history of seventeenth century england, this isn't it. But i tend to think of foreign perceptions sometimes a bit like political cartoons that, you know, if you put them together, you'd be able to reconstruct the history of a period.
‘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