France

''For his final book, the late Norwich tackled the dauntingly vast subject of two millennia of French history with admirable lightness and urbanity . . . his comic footnotes deserve a review of their own'' DAILY TELEGRAPH I can still feel, as if it were yesterday, the excitement of my first Channel crossing (as a child of nearly 7) in September 1936; the regiment of porters, smelling asphyxiatingly of garlic in their blue-green blousons; the raucous sound all around me of spoken French; the immense fields of Normandy strangely devoid of hedges; then the Gare du Nord at twilight, the policemen with their képis and their little snow-white batons; and my first sight of the Eiffel Tower . . . This book is written in the belief that the average English-speaking man or woman has remarkably little knowledge of French history. We may know a bit about Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Louis XIV, but for most of us that''s about it. In my own three schools we were taught only