For 1000 years, the insults and snubs have flowed across the English Channel - and back, writes Stephen Clarke

The modern insults aimed at "frog-eaters and snail-slurpers" are nothing new to tourists in England or France. Relations between the French and anyone impudent enough to speak English have always been enlivened by wars and name-calling.

Just in case you naively imagined that the entente might be getting more cordiale, here are the Top 20 foot-in-mouth moments.

20. In 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni declined a planned second night's stay at Windsor and returned to Paris a day early. What rudeness!

19. Then again, the Queen did welcome them to Windsor with an escort of Household Cavalrymen, whose uniform features breastplates that are facsimiles of those taken from dead Frenchmen at Waterloo. Also present were soldiers from the Blues and Royals, wearing a golden eagle in celebration of the capture of Napoleon's colours at the same battle.

18. And the lead horse in the escort was called Agincourt. Another was called Zut Alors!

17. And to get to the banqueting hall, dinner guests had to file through an anteroom called the Waterloo Room, and admire portraits of the Waterloo victors Wellington and Blücher.

16. That symbol of Anglo-French friendship, the Channel Tunnel, opened in 1994. Its London terminal was Waterloo. Merde alors!

15. When the French offered to host Nato's military headquarters in 1949, they proposed Rocquencourt as the base, which is not only unpronounceable by non-Frenchmen, it's also the scene of the Napoleonic Army's final victory.

14. In the TV series Yes, Minister in 1982, Sir Humphrey reveals that Britain's nuclear deterrent isn't protecting the country from the Russians - it's pointed at the French: "They were our mortal enemies for centuries, and old leopards don't change their spots."

13. Apparently furious that male Londoners weren't ogling her, Édith Cresson, the French première ministre, declared in 1991 that "one in four Englishmen is gay".

12. Britain, the US and France were allies in World War II, so the following comments were presumably meant as friendly banter. Churchill on De Gaulle: "He looks like a female llama who has just been surprised in the bath." US President Roosevelt's nickname for De Gaulle: "The temperamental lady." De Gaulle on the Brits: " England , like Germany, is our hereditary enemy." With allies like these, who needs ennemis?

11. In an interview with Le Monde in 1989, Margaret Thatcher lectured the French that Britain had its revolution first, and that France's was just "a period of terror".

10. Just 18 months after the end of World War I, the French elected Joan of Arc - a heroine of the Hundred Years War against the English - as their patron saint.

9. It's well known that American growers saved the French wine industry by supplying grapevines that were immune to the phylloxera aphid that devastated France's vineyards. Less well known is that the infestation was caused by infected vines imported from the US. Oops!

8. Le Monde published a 48-page supplement about the Liberation of France in 2004. The first mention of non-French troops is on page 18.

7. In 1990, The Sun, in full anti-EU rage, told all "frog-haters" to face France and "tell the feelthy French to frog off".

6. After London "stole" the 2012 Olympics from Paris, enraged Parisians accused Tony and Cherie Blair of lobbying Olympic Committee delegates throughout the night before the vote, instead of going to bed, as President Chirac did.

5. When in 1966 General de Gaulle pulled out of Nato and ordered all US soldiers to leave French territory, President Johnson asked: "Does that include those buried in it?"

4. Incensed by France's refusal to enter the Iraq war in 2003, Americans removed all traces of French from their menus, creating Freedom fries, Freedom toast, etc. little realising that Sodexo, the company that runs many US military canteens, is French.

3. In 1850, the ailing former King Louis-Philippe, in exile in England , was sent to the Sussex seaside by his British doctors. He died soon afterwards. The Times obituary rather unsportingly recorded the King's "absence of mental faculties".

2. The deposed French Emperor Napoleon III, also in exile in England, died in 1873 while being operated on by a British surgeon. In 1879, Napoleon III's son was killed by Zulus while under the protection of the British Army in South Africa. In effect, the Brits have done what no French revolution achieved: they finished off both France's royal and imperial dynasties.

1. France "forgets" to invite the Queen to the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in 2009. Another of those coincidences, perhaps? Or just the latest low punch in the never-ending Anglo-French "friendly" boxing match?

• Stephen Clarke's new book, 1000 Years of Annoying the French, published by Bantam Press, will be on sale in May.