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In 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.

The old Notre Dame had evolved over many centuries and lived through dramatic times. Sacked during the Revolution, it was returned to glory for Napoleon’s coronation. John not only discusses these aspects of its history with Clive but probes the contribution of the great 19th-century restorer Eugene Violet-le-Duc, a rationalist whose approach was unlike that of his English contemporaries, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whereas the latter believed that old buildings bore witness to the lives of the masons who created them, and that every ancient stone was therefore sacred and irreplaceable, Violet-le-Duc held that a cathedral such as Notre-Dame could be returned to an ideal medieval state. So he ruthlessly swept away later work. Not all that he did was bad. As Victor Hugo attests, the state of the cathedral in 1831, when The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared, was lamentable. Viollet-le-Duc, working there for 20 years, put it back in shape; but much of the decoration and roofline – the spire that has fallen, for example, as well as the gargoyles and carved monsters on the roof – were his.

Now a new layer of history has been added to the great medieval edifice. What does John make of it?

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An extraordinary cultural loan is about to take place: soon, while its home in France is being improved, the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum for two years. This will give members of the British public, along with visitors to London from overseas, the chance to get up close to one of the founding documents of England’s story. One of the foremost medievalists in the country, John is in a prime position to lead the discussion with Clive on this unparallelled work of art.

The survival of the so-called tapestry – really a piece of embroidery – is itself remarkable. Only one section of this ancient textile has disappeared; the rest of the 224ft composition remains almost incredibly intact. Where was it made? Who stitched it? Who composed the design? These questions cannot be answered with certainty. There is a likely candidate, though, for the patron who commissioned it. This was William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also Earl of Kent; he may have ordered it for the consecration of his cathedral in Bayeux.

If the origins of the Bayeux Tapestry are obscure, the story-telling is not. John and Clive delight in the vivid and economical narrative, as well as the information it coincidentally displays about palaces, boats, horses, feasting and Norman armour. Although celebrated in its time, the tapestry was largely forgotten until ‘rediscovered’ by an 18th-century monk. Later, Hitler regarded the Bayeux Tapestry as an object he was anxious to display in Berlin but luckily the liberation of Paris occurred before he was able to take it out of the country.

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In advance of Remembrance Sunday on November 11, Clive has been visiting the Commonwealth War Graves in France. The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it was called when established in 1917, was the brain child of Fabian Ware, a civil servant turned newspaper editor who commanded a Red Cross dressing station during the First World War and was therefore saw the horror at first hand. Ware realised that the hundreds of thousands of young men who died for Britain deserved proper burial and commemoration. The losses were on a scale unknown in previous wars, and the monuments and cemeteries built to remember them were also completely without precedent. The British government rose to the challenge, finding a solution that was supremely well-adapted to the character of the nation. The result was one of the greatest commissions of public art ever seen.

Clive and John discuss this epic achievement. On the Somme alone there were about 450 cemeteries, requiring monumental expression. Architecturally, this gave the lead architects --
Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Herbert Baker, who were later joined by Charles Holden (who twice rejected a knighthood) – an unparallelled opportunity to design structures that were both poetic and abstract, akin to music in having no practical value than in the remembering the Fallen. Today no one can see the cemeteries of the First World War without feeling deeply moved by the experience. Fortunately, the need arose at time when it was possible to find a shared architectural language for the profoundest emotions, centred on a nation’s sense of loss.