A few years ago, I was phoned by a journalist seeking a comment on a recent survey of schoolchildren that had revealed their shocking ignorance about the history of the Second World War. A few of them, he informed me, thought that VE day had something to do with sexually transmitted diseases. A lot of them identified Churchill as a bulldog advertising insurance products on television. And some of them, he said – by now waxing indignant – even thought that France had fought the war on the side of the Germans.
I wasn’t quite sure how to break the news to him. I told him,
