President tells Omar Waraich that Islamists will try to take advantage of country's plight

Bill Millin was the "Mad Piper" who played allied commandos ashore under heavy German fire at Sword Beach in Normandy on D-Day, on the extreme eastern flank of Operation Overlord.

New flights from London have provided a quick new route to this chi-chi Normandy resort. Kate Simon reports

Switching between grand strategy and local slaughter, and always with a careful eye for the suffering of bombed, shelled and terrorised civilians, Beevor stretches his history between the jittery first days of June 1944 and the end of August – when De Gaulle walked under fire into Notre Dame.

Who buys encyclopaedias these days? I am old enough to remember the encyclopaedia salesman, a stoical figure who went hopefully from door to door trying to get sceptical householders to purchase all the world's knowledge, leather-bound in 24 volumes, on the instalment plan; the selling point was that this would help get little Johnny or little Jane through their school exams and into university.

Seventy years on, veterans recall the 'miracle' of Dunkirk

The IoS visual art critic, Charles Darwent, took a trip to northern France to roll up his sleeves and get creative. And, yes, it was every bit as hard as it looks

Despite the odd blast from nit-picking scholars, Alison Weir deserves the large and loyal popular following for her readable historical biographies. She seems set fair to tow them after her now that she has embarked upon historical novels about the same characters. But I can't help feeling that she has missed the celestial omnibus with The Captive Queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) is the most fabulous (literally) of subjects.

Normandy Notebook

A 38-year-old woman has been jailed for 15 years for killing six of her newborn babies.

For three decades, from the year of the coronation, 1953, until the period of the Falklands conflict in 1982, Geoffrey Woolley was a potent, if unseen and largely unknown, influence on British public life. As Letters Editor of The Times he was the final arbiter of what and whose letters were published, which were afforded prominence as lead-letters, and at what point any long-running, controversial correspondence should be terminated. Fifty and more years ago – before the emergence of The Independent, The Guardian, and the Today programme – letters to The Times played an almost exclusive role in setting the public agenda, and Woolley's judgement was pivotal. Above all he was fair to those with minority or dissenting opinions. Woolley refused to be pressured by anybody – least of all by MPs.

The museum was built to remember the D-Day dead. Now, reports John Lichfield, it is riven by a family feud

When the author J D Salinger died on Wednesday at the age of 91, his obituaries were as one in crediting him with the invention of teenage angst. His only published novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is regarded as the quintessential expression of adolescent alienation, while his refusal to explain himself intrigued critics.

Normandy provides the perfect location for a family holiday with a difference