“... rest of it look like very small beer when compared to the £344,000 that Tessa Jowell’s husband, David Mills, stands accused of receiving from Silvio Berlusconi in return for the well-spun evidence he gave in two corruption trials involving the Italian prime minister in the late 1990s. In February Mills was found guilty of corruption and given four and a ...”

“... A few years ago, a brilliant small book on detective fiction appeared in France called Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent ...”

“... The organisers are almost bashful about the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-90, which runs at the National Gallery until 28 January. Impressionist pictures are guaranteed to draw a crowd. But the individual painters, the social context, optical science and technique have all, as they point out, been analysed in books ...”

“... and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first and most popular novel, Les Choses (1965), which still sells twenty thousand copies a year. Les Choses describes, with a sociological exactitude justified in the novel’s concluding quotation from Marx, the ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... are perceived’, and it’s this faculty which malfunctions in Hartman’s more fanciful flights. David Simpson’s central subject is indicated by Hartman’s passing remark about Wordsworth’s ‘residual agrarian sensibility’. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination is his second book on Wordsworth, following and complementing Wordsworth and the Figurings ...”

“... Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in 1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest danger were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion, followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent ...”

“... by five African states (Burundi, Zaire, Senegal, Uganda and Tanzania) and four Western nations (France, Belgium, Germany and the US), the Arusha Agreement was initiated and led by the OAU, but was predicated on a UN presence to oversee the transition to democracy. After the disasters of Bosnia and Somalia, Boutros Boutros Ghali was desperate for a ...”

“... already been printed elsewhere, but a number of them appear here for the first time. Professor David Dilks has provided, in his introduction to each volume, a lucid and dispassionate account of the main lines of development of British foreign policy, and a framework into which the individual essays can be fitted. Nearly all these detailed studies ...”

“... as a client kingdom that would promote free trade and by extension the trade and prestige of France. When they finally met, de Estrada unwittingly snubbed Napoleon’s progressive self-image by explaining that Mexico needed ‘a dictatorship on the pattern established in France’. But this didn’t prevent the two men ...”

“... petulant reminder, issued on the day Baker’s appointment was announced, that Russia, France and Germany had forfeited their access to America’s $18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts. ‘It’s understandable that the Bush team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and ...”

“... and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he suggests that the Bon Marché was not an isolated enterprise but that it ...”

“... yes to the first and no to the second. In many European countries it was the other way round. In France, for instance, it was decided that only the state could be permitted to benefit from the large profits to be made in the gambling business; anything else might threaten the moral fabric of the republic. But given it was the state that was benefiting, there ...”

“... Bunter’s to run headlong into things, with preposterously beneficial results for all concerned. David Hughes, in his latest novel, takes this trait and turns it on its head: the outcome of Bunter’s intervention in certain notable episodes of the 20th century is very serious indeed. By this account, Bunter is personally responsible for the arrest of ...”

“... New York Jew’. The Leo Frank case, which occurred in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair in France and at the time of the imprisonment of the Ukrainian Jewish factory manager Mendel Beilis on a charge of ritual murder, was a highwater mark in American anti-semitism. Shortly after the Georgia jury convicted Frank, a jury of Ukrainian peasants acquitted ...”