This is a wonderfully entertaining piece of `alternative' history; well, I say `piece' - it is of course 1000 years worth of history, all of it true and all of it mega-interesting, most of which won't be available in more conventional history books. My favourite chapters? The Hundred Years War (chapter three) which the author says was `120 years of terror inflicted on French civilians by out-of-control English bandits' (our sympathies are with the bandits, of course); the demise of poor Joan of Arc (chapter four), betrayed by the French for making the disastrous fashion mistake of wearing trousers at her trial; and the accounts of French exploration, all of which were uniformly catastrophic. See, for example, chapter seven (French Canada, or How To Lose a Colony); and chapter fourteen (India and Tahiti: France Gets Lost in Paradise). Yes, it's true that when the 17th century French explorer La Salle was on the point of naming the vast areas surrounding the Mississippi in the Deep South of America, as well as the fertile pastures of what is now Illinois as important centres of French colonization, Louis XIV declared that La Salle's efforts were `utterly pointless, and similar expeditions should be prevented'. Sacre Bleu! Enjoy...