It was two years ago that the Oscar-winning blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer‘ sent the message that it was the Americans, or rather one American in particular, who was responsible for the atomic explosion that brought the Second World War to an explosive close.

Out of the mouths of babes comes the truth unfiltered. With little regard for the sensitivities of the adult world, young children will repeat what they have observed and heard, including a wide range of “swears” (at least in my house). In medieval French fiction and miracle tales, as Julie Singer demonstrates in this new book, a surprising number of infants are imagined as talking such truth to power.

I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow.

Are we, to echo Keir Starmer’s now infamous phrase, “an island of strangers”? No. But there is a deep cultural divide in this country, a cultural dissonance we don’t discuss but should. Witness the row about the Wythall Flaggers, the group that has erected numerous St George’s flags in the Worcestershire village to parade its patriotism. What does it mean?

When it comes to the ‘exotic, tawdry, and very confusing’ subject of assassinations, there have been few lone wolves. Simon Ball’s exhaustive study shows that, behind every shot fired, there’s usually a complicated conspiracy.

Among the treasures of the British Library is an unassuming manuscript identified by the shelfmark MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. Named after its early-modern collector, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Roman emperor whose bust once sat atop its shelf in Cotton’s library, the manuscript is a little smaller than seven inches long and five inches wide, the size of a very small paperback.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of 100 stories divided between ten narrators, all Florentines who have withdrawn to the countryside to hide out from the Black Death. The ninth tale told on the sixth day features Guido Cavalcanti, “one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher … a very elegant and cultivated man and very fluent in his speech”.

Why is Catholicism sexy again? The sudden surge in interest, especially among younger people, can be traced back to several sources. One is superficial, an aesthetic engagement: the Met Gala in 2018, where Rihanna wore a beaded minidress and papal tiara; or the “Hot Priest” in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, “only in it for the outfits”.

Christian missionaries were central to European colonialism, providing a cloak of justice and moral authority, a model of “civilised” expansionism and colonial oversight of subjugated peoples. Governments, traders and explorers exploited this aura of ethical responsibility of Christian civilisation to the “heathen.” In England’s imperial adventures it was the Church of England that played a key role.

Imaginary places, as the Hungarian architect Ákos Moravánszky observed, are invested with strong identities. He gave the example of the Kingdom of Oz – it is a place that does not exist, but everyone knows how it differs from Kansas. Central Europe is another such place, a region that has no formal boundaries or definition, yet refuses stubbornly to disappear.