In November 1791 Wordsworth popped over to France to see the Revolution.

‘Leave it to George’ , a polite way of saying ‘pass the buck’, was once a popular saying in the UK and in America, however it originated in France.

It’s often hard to unscramble fact from fiction regarding the history of the French royal family. Not so in the case of the assassination of Henry III, the last Valois king.

Max Ernst, the French Surrealist, died on his birthday, 1 April 1976. He loved the irony. It was, you might say, surreal.

Anne of Beaujeu, Regent of France, invited a young man with the extraordinary name of Perkin Warbeck to the French Court at Château Amboise.

Hard to take in but there he was, the man himself in the flesh so to speak, at Château Clos Lucé, Amboise Friday 2 February telling a captivated audience how Léo came about.

Ever since William (known as The Conqueror in his home town of Caen, The Bastard in London) brought his language and culture to England, the English have always hot footed it to France.

It turns out that Yolande of Valois, who was born in to her impoverished father’s Court in Tours, was responsible for The Cult of The Turin Shroud.