clever and entertaining - Rated 
What I like best is to be enlightened AND entertained. Problem is I hate serious stuff but I also dislike fluff and what Touché achieves is to be light and profound at the same time. I now understand so many things about the Brits and the French (am Dutch, living in London), it makes my life much easier with my colleagues.
Fab and fun - Rated
Am a fan of her writing in The Guardian. The book is as witty and insightful: serious at times but always tongue in cheeck. Well done, Agie!
Too cocksure - Rated 
The author and I crossed the Channel in opposite directions at roughly the same time, in the mid 1990s. She was in her early 20s and I was approaching 50. And she reckons she knows it all!
One thing I have come to recognise over the years is that you can't always be sure you can accurately answer the question from your French friends, `And how do they do that in England?' Because as time passes things change and even though I have visited regularly, still listen to the Today programme, and watch British telly, I cannot be sure that I am up to date with how things are in everyday high street culture.
The author has no such doubts, all these years on, about her own familiarity with `French' culture. I put `French' in quotes, because what she knows is not French culture, but Parisian, (what's more, she was brought up in `petit bourgeois' Paris by her own admission). And everyone knows that Paris and the rest of France are miles from one another, and sworn enemies.
She compounds her ignorance by claiming to know how they do things in England, when clearly her experience is of `petit bourgeois' London. At least, (based on my own experience of having been brought up similarly in London, but having spent ten years each in Berkshire and Staffordshire) the gap between London and the rest of England is not as great as the gap between the capital of France and the rest of the nation. One way and another, the author gets plain facts just plain wrong, a lot of the time.
That said, I agree with a great deal of what she says, as she tries, from her intellectual socialist bias, to explain the differences between the English and the French, and I get just as angry as she does about for instance the sheer filthy lies about the European Community that are fed to the British by their own press. However, she is just too unreliable on basic facts, concerning both countries, for one to be able learn safely from her about the different cultures. I hope that with hindsight she at least will be squirming with embarrassment at what she has written in years to come.
I have only read the 2006 edition, which 18 months or so on shows its age. Her loathed Sarkozy (please, Brits, say SARkozy, not SarkoZEE, you'll be much nearer the correct pronunciation) is now doing his best to shake France into the last quarter of the 20th century (sic). Since the author claims to have fled France because of Chirac, presumably she'll not be rushing back here soon.
Funny and clever book comparing the differences - Rated 
This is an unusual book in that it is not the average book that you might expect on this subject but instead it cleverly combines together both anecdotes and rather more sophisticated views on the subjects it tackles. As such it has a wide appeal (since it is never snobbish or intellectual and consequently inaccessible). Although there is slightly more attention given to the French, I think this is not necessarily a bad thing since, being English, I know my countrymen quite well already!
This book deals with the often opposing English and French take on things. It's isn't a travel book nor a book in the same vein as A Year in Provence or suchlike. It is very easy to read and is fully of interesting facts and stories.
Thoroughly researched and a thoroughly recommended!
Disappointing - Rated 
I've enjoyed some of her newspaper articles, but the book is a disappointment. She's not quite as clever as she thinks she is, and her unthinking anti-Americanism is just annoying. She also doesn't really know enough about the UK to act as a commentator - she has little knowledge of life outside central London, and very little historical background. The book has heavy-handed attempts at humour, but mainly of the grim Stalinist sort typical of Guardianistas.
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