We look at each other across the Channel with a sense of mutual superiority. Of course each of us thinks we are better than the other. But we have to try much harder than they do. There’s nothing new in this, it’s one of the oldest comparative facts about us. Eight hundred years ago, Saladin’s biographer Beha ed-Din compared the status of Richard I and Philippe II. Though England was greater in “wealth, reputation and valour”, Richard’s “kingdom and rank were inferior to the French king”.

How do they do that?

Two hundred years ago, Lady Granville remarked that there was “not so much mind as would fill a pea-shell” among the upper reaches of fashionable France, but “their effect upon me is to crush me with a sense of my inferiority whilst I am absolutely gasping with a sense of my superiority.” It was then as now: The French have an “aplomb, a language, a dress de covenance” which we simply can’t match in single combat.

The cartoons drawn by Francophobic satirists of the Napoleonic Wars were vile in a very English way (you can see where Steve Bell comes from). But they portrayed England’s great enemy attractively, in fact as a suave superman who made English women tingle (which he did, when they went over in their thousands to see him during the brief peace of Amiens). The same cartoonists drew John Bull as a fat, beery, big-fisted, low-cultured fellow with a huge, stupid face and a huge, stupid wife. This was meant in a positive way. The bedrock of the British character lay in this bestial but well-found creature. The French, it hardly needs saying, don’t see themselves like that at all.

Britain and France are like two strands of DNA. We’ve been coiling round one another since the middle of the Dark Ages, separate but connected. Militarily, diplomatically, politically, artistically and culturally — we’ve each been regarding the other out of the corner of our eyes, even at our most self-absorbed. We’ve had a thousand years of conquest, counter-conquest, re-conquest. We’ve struggled with each other in a way that has had enormous effects across the world. There’s a whole skein of global history — in Africa, India, America — that has been created by our rivalry. Our drama has been played out at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Third World lives.

And for all our similarities, intermarriage and mutual influence, we remain very different from each other. Modern readers resist the idea of “a national character” (it reminds them of blood and soil, and they think it sounds fascist). But we’ve been consistently saying the same things about each other for hundreds of years.

For instance: In the middle of some chapter about some dreadful battle there was an account of a battalion that refused to surrender. It expressed the idea that many French like to have of themselves. France, the author observed, was a country characterised by “an authoritative State, contempt for parties and compromise, a shared taste for action, obsession with . . . the grandeur of France . . . a refusal to bow to the inevitable and dignity in defeat.”

Who said that? It could have been any of our many Francophiles (was it Hazlitt? Or Byron?). Palmerston, possibly? On the other side, it might have been Voltaire after he’d renounced his Anglophilia. Napoleon might have said it, of course, or Napoleon II, or Napoleon III? I won’t go on. This summary of French gloire was uttered by . . . de Villepin, the prime minister in 2005 (a prime minister characteristic of France in that he never felt the need to trouble the voters).

History lives with us. You look at Napoleon’s Continental System (its monetary union, tariff barriers, industry protections, one-law) and you see philosophies, administrative structures and economic practises that underlie the European Union. Our national narratives chatter along in the background. Our national characters evolve. Our prejudices on both sides of the Channel seem remarkably resilient and some have been appearing in the same form since the thirteenth century.

Jane Thynne talks about the setting and inspiration for her latest novel, a fascinating love story with its roots in the mysteries of ancient Egypt.

Simon Carr , the best selling author of The Boys Are Back (now a Miramax-distributed film starring Clive Owen) presents To Be Franc - a fascinating study of the differences between England and France over the last 1,500 years

John Carey is Emeritus Merton professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He is an eminent critic, reviewer and broadcaster and will be contributing a forward to the first Byline Classic. Byline Classics are works of literature which we believe have been unjustly forgotten or neglected, and each will be chosen by a distinguished writer, academic or journalist.

Alexander Chancellor, the journalist, columnist and prize winning editor (he invented the modern Spectator, and created the Independent on Sunday magazine), publishes a collection of his columns written over the last fifty years.