On French cathedrals
Compared to some others, I didn't buy that much at the Alumni bookfair - about thirty books, a lot of them on cricket. Haigh, Frith, CMJ, Cardus, Fingleton, and some late 19th century equivalents of Steve Waugh's Captain's Diary (one by Ranjitsinhji, one by George Giffen). But I also picked up a book called English Cathedrals, by John Harvey.

It was first published in 1950, with my edition printed in 1961. The book doesn't explicitly tell us that English cathedrals are better than those in the rest of the world, but this suggestion is made strongly, particularly when comparing England to France. Let's see what Harvey has to say about France.

With the outstanding exception of Bourges, the greatest of the French cathedrals are cold and aloof, fired only by a detached mental fervour akin to the passion of the higher mathematician and the astronomer for their lofty subjects.

That's just as well - most of you can still enjoy French cathedrals.

No concession is made to human frailty, the quality of mercy is absent from their terrible judgments upon the puny beings who pass through their doors. At Chartres the glorious windows, many of them given by the gilds of local craftsmen, infuse a different atmosphere; but the statues of the porches appal the spirit by their chilly disdain of mundane affairs. The French cathedrals fall under the great condemnation of French thought, despite their grandeur and logic: having all things, they yet lack charity.

The strict adherence of French art to prepared schemes of iconography; the refusal of the architects to countenance decorative elements such as stellar vaulting; the overburden of heavy flying buttresses to which they were constrained by insistence upon height: all bear witness to this hidden spiritual weakness in France.

He then says that he doesn't want to disparage French cathedrals. Let's see a direct comparison between the two countries:

French logic and mental clarity were carried to such an extreme that the ideal of one perfect solution, and one only, of any problem was always kept in mind. The commonsense Englishmen, working by rule-of-thumb, was not deterred by theory from doing just what he liked.
...
The English temperament is uneasy upon the heights; at its best it still remains human, not bound to the earth, but firmly rooted in it; even in its flights of idealism it shuns the purely mystical abstraction and seeks some pratical expression of its fervour. Like the ideal Chinese mirrored in Confucius, the Englishman rarely spears of spiritual beings. Hence there is a warmth, a welcoming and homely quality in the English cathedrals which cannot be found elsewhere.