Why go to Mars, says Peter Hitchens in The New Statesman, when you can go to France and have a much more “exotic and illuminating” experience? I first became enthralled by our neighbour – that “sweet enemy” – as a schoolboy, after travelling to Paris in 1965 on the now sadly defunct Golden Arrow. How could another country be so similar to ours, and yet so different? Paris smelt different to London (not in a bad way) and it sounded different. “There were still gendarmes in capes and kepis.” The aluminium coins would blow away in a strong wind, and there were no pillows, only “bolsters as hard as sandbags”. It was plain even to a 14-year old that there was “a good deal more sex than in England”.

The stately Third Republic French I learnt at my Devon prep school was still more or less in use. Restaurant menus were hand-written in that wild, looped script that has all but vanished; there were first-class carriages on the Metro (painted yellow) and television hadn’t really caught on – a horizontal line repeatedly swept the screen, even when General de Gaulle was on. And the trains were pulled by muscular black steam locomotives which emitted a strangely incongruous and effeminate peeping sound. It’s a bygone world, but there are still remnants if you know where to look. Should you be lucky enough to travel to the lovely city of Troyes, for example, 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”.

When Britain had to appoint a new ambassador to the US in 1939, says Tim Bouverie in Engelsberg Ideas, the government knew it was a big decision. The UK’s relationship with America would determine its ability to “weather the coming storm”. Which is why Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, seemed such an odd choice. The former colonial administrator had parroted Nazi propaganda in national newspapers after meeting Hitler in 1935, and condoned Germany’s invasion of Austria two years later. In the Foreign Office, the peer was known as “Lord Loathsome”. But Lothian renounced his appeasement in the winter of 1938/39, and went on to “set the standard for future ambassadors”.

Unlike most members of the British elite, he not only knew the US, but liked it. During the interwar years he had visited 44 of the then 48 states and established friendships with an array of politicians, academics, businessmen and journalists. Where previous British ambassadors had seen diplomacy as something to be conducted in private, Lothian spoke engagingly and often, and greatly expanded the embassy social circle, using lunches and dinners as “opportunities to expound the British case”. He cultivated an image of a “democratic aristocrat”: a man who, despite being an English lord, drove his own car, bought his own train tickets and “wore a battered grey fedora”. It worked. He was instrumental in convincing Franklin D Roosevelt to implement Lend Lease, the $50bn shipment of American food, oil and materiel to Allied nations that made an “incalculable contribution” to their victory.

⚾️🌭 Lothian’s successor, Lord Halifax, never quite had the same charm. Attending a baseball game in Chicago not long after he began the job, he disparaged America’s national sport by observing that it was “a bit like cricket, except that we don’t question the umpire’s decision so much”. Worse still, he left an uneaten hot dog under his seat.