My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking-Frenchmen had a spokesperson.

The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon.

Serge Gainsbourg, like Charles Bukowski, is one of those blokes who should be banned as a role model for impressionable young men, who may start imagining they too can behave like disgusting old soaks and pull any gorgeous bird who comes into their orbit. Note to Gainsbourg wannabes -  this only works if you're a creative genius as well.

Coppélia is the name of the doll in the ballet-comedy - not that of the heroine, who is a bad pixie named Swanilda, a girl of youthful capriciousness but a heart of gold.

Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters' inclination towards such dreary soliloquising you feel like yelling, "For heaven's sake, shut up and get back to the full-frontal fornicating!" At first glance, the story of Bluebeard would appear to be right up her street.

The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.

The unveiling of the Serpentine Pavilion (now in its 10th year) has become as much of a summer fixture as Henley. And yet it is not without controversy. Why, for instance, does the Serpentine Gallery in London insist on commissioning global stars such as Frank Gehry and now Jean Nouvel when it could be giving up-and-coming architects much needed exposure? Its original remit was to show architects who had not yet built on British soil, but though this has held true for eight of the 10 commissions, it certainly wasn't true of Gehry (who had built a cancer unit in Dundee), nor now of Nouvel: his One New Change, a shopping and office complex right next to St Paul's Cathedral, will be unveiled in the autumn. Other commissions have been by equally illustrious figures.

As an 11-year-old boy, I was awestruck from the first moment I saw Concorde on our three-channel black-and-white television, seemingly rearing up from its runway like a cyborg swan. At that age - and during that era - fact and fiction became vertiginously blurred when it concerned the fast-forward march of science and technology. While Factual-man was taking one slow-motion giant leap for mankind, Fictional-man was going where no man had gone before. And even if the US Enterprise did have warp-drive, our very own Concorde didn’t seem that far behind, as it hurtled through the blue at the proverbial speed of a bullet.