World Cheese Book

“How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?”, Charles de Gaulle, French wartime Resistance leader and President from 1958 to 1969, famously asked. In the 40 years since de Gaulle's death, things have moved on: the editor of this World Cheese Book, Juliet Harbutt, an authority on cheese who established the British Cheese Awards in 1994, told the Financial Times last December that the “total” for France now stood at 600, but the UK produced a hundred more – approximately 700 cheeses or 11.4 cheese variants per million population, putting the UK ahead of...