The inhabitants are roughly the same shape and size as us. Some sort of communication is possible between us, though do not get carried away. Since first travelling to Paris on the old Golden Arrow express (alas, long defunct) as a schoolboy in 1965, I have been enthralled by our neighbour, that sweet enemy.

How could another country be so similar to ours and yet so utterly different? Paris smelt different from London in those days, not in a bad way. It sounded different.

It was different. There were no pillows, only bolsters as hard as sandbags. The coins were either made of aluminium, like East German marks, and would blow away in a strong wind, or were ancient, blackened copper discs dating from the age of Clemenceau.

The stately Third Republic French I had learned at my Devon prep school was more or less still in use. Restaurant menus were spirit-duplicated in purple ink and handwritten in that wild looped script that has now vanished, but had once been taught by professeurs to élèves in lycées. There were first-class carriages on the Metro (painted yellow).

Television had not been properly invented – a horizontal line repeatedly swept across the screen, even when General de Gaulle (then in the midst of a presidential election) was speaking. There were still gendarmes in capes and kepis. The trains from Calais to Amiens were pulled by muscular black steam locomotives which, when annoyed, emitted strange and incongruously effeminate peeping sounds.

It was plain even to my 14-year-old self that there was a good deal more sex than in England. As the years passed, and I made more interplanetary visits, I also came to realise that the politics, history and religion were different too. The contrast between raffish, unofficial Fleet Street, where I worked, and the row of pseudo-ministerial black Citroëns parked outside the offices of Le Monde in the Boulevard des Italiens was highly educational.

So was the suspicious, conspiratorial response of the French Trotskyists on the Left Bank whom I sought to befriend in my Bolshevik days. For all its Declarations of the Rights of Man, France always remained a rather grim-visaged monarchy, thinly disguised as a republic. Should you be lucky enough to travel to the lovely city of Troyes, you will find on the town hall a rare example of the original version of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, carved in stone.

Unlike the modern style, it continues “… ou la mort”. But what I did not grasp at the time, smug as I was about the security and superiority of Britain, was that Britain and France were both passing through the same dismal process of humiliation and decline. And that, under Charles de Gaulle, they were making a better job of it.

This was because we had “won the war” – that is to say we had ended up on the winning side, whereas France had been ruined in 1940. I owe my epiphany on the subject to Julian Jackson, who has written one of the greatest books of our age, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, and to the American Catholic magazine First Things, which asked me to review it in 2019. It was like reading a hurricane or an earthquake.

I sat on well into the night, reading and taking notes until my eyes were sore. Here were politics and history, and a man who could climb, stride, swim or struggle his way through them like no other, in a country which was more worth saving than any but my own. And better still, here was a man of profound reading, broad education and intelligent ruthlessness, who was physically brave, knew how to get power, and knew how to use it when he got it.

Incidentally, he was very, very funny when he wanted to be, and genuinely devoted to his family. You should read it. But one of the many conclusions I drew was this: that de Gaulle had achieved his aims by combining in one figure and one government a series of precepts that never seemed to arrive together in Britain – patriotism and strong armed forces, rigorous education, a reasonable level of order and justice, and at the same time a welfare state that removed all the terrors of destitution and ill-health which haunt the poor and weak.

As I wrote, it is a strange thing that this potentially attractive political combination seldom exists in the advanced countries of the West. You may have some of these things, but never all of them at once. De Gaulle was a rare exception, who did seek to bring these elements together, and so appealed far beyond any partisan constituency.

He also despised the supranational ambitions of Brussels and refused to be pushed around by the US. It is true that the man himself was hard to imagine in Britain, a sort of wild, improbable merger between Winston Churchill, the Du