Once upon a time, my brother was working in the Dominican library in Paris. This was in the early 1980s and he was doing research for his PhD - on the subject of baptism in the ninth to twelfth centuries. Another man often worked there and they would talk now and then but they never actually introduced themselves. The other man sometimes gave my brother a lift across town when they left the library. He seemed rather authoritative. One day he asked my brother, ‘Who are you working with?’ and my brother said ‘Jacques le Goff’, a very renowned medieval historian. ‘Ah, le Goff, yes, he's very astute’, the man said, and my brother thought my goodness, who is this man to pass judgement so confidently on le Goff. Another day, when the news was full of the Pope, John Paul II, coming to Paris, my brother asked the man if he was going to see the pope.