Winning when losing

I love Ben Mcintyre's columns. They're always so different. Today's, on Abba, is a real treat:

Waterloo, for example, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, even though it refers to a military victory that only the British care about. “My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.”

One Abbaologist has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that this is “clearly an attempt to recontextualise 19th-century European geopolitics. Napoleon had so subverted the principles of the French Revolution that for most Frenchmen his defeat was the only way civilisation could be saved.” I feel like I win when I lose. How typically French.

BTW, his biography of Agent Zigzag is a classic. I'd put it in the same class as Bernard Wasserstein's simply wonderful Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. Anyone who hasn't read that should drop everything now and make good that ommission.