No redeeming features to this story -- it goes nowhere; reveals nothing; is pointless, pompous and visually slack

In contrast to a recent reviewer I am a long-term fan of William Boyd -- and I was very disappointed by this pot-boiler.

The plot is thin and creaky and at the end many of the significant threads remain unresolved. It does zip along, true, which is testament to Mr Boyd's skill as a writer. But it is otherwise a poorly crafted piece of work -- superficial and unmoving. And we should at least expect of a writer of the stature of Mr Boyd that he knows the difference between "infer" and "imply" -- which he uses twice in the wrong way.

As a film this is disappointingly poorly executed -- looking for the most part cheaply produced and badly lit. As a piece of alternative history it is so shot through with holes that it doesn't hang together. If it's supposed to be comedy, it's not very funny. If it's supposed to be social satire, it's blunt.

This takes a little application and some thinking to appreciate -- so it won't suit everyone. Ely's peek into the future -- first published 16 years ago -- doesn't explain everything straight away but lets the reader develop ideas, creating a personal mindscape of the future. It's a bleak dystopian vision of a future dominated by engineering prowess (or is it?) and corporate chicanery. In a time when the sea level is creeping inexorably upwards worldwide, when corporate and political misbehaviour demonstrate that exactly the wrong people have been entrusted with our collective future, it's a sobering read -- with no happy ending.

Let's not beat about the bush. This book is appallingly trite; poorly edited and boringly presented by people who can't write for toffee.

The style is irritatingly breathless and evangelistic as if the authors were trying to write an article for Time. The overall effect is to produce a management text-book written by Walter Winchell.

The 'benefits' of the so-called New Capitalism are givens, according to the authors. The central tenet of their case is that activists have to speak the langauage of business if they wish to change the way that business works. This arrogance now looks very dated in the light of the events of the past two years.

It is perhaps exactly the other way round that the argument should be phrased: if capitalism is not to be entirely discredited it must begin to recognise its obligations to a wide variety of interest groups -- not simply shareholders. Or even more pertinently, those who control businesses must recognise their responsibility to society as a whole and not just consider their own pay-packets under the pretence of advancing 'shareholder value'

It doesn't take a degree in French-Moroccan political history to keep up with this but the plot line is admittedly not straight-forward. Once you get used to the technique that the director is using to tell the story then there is a gopd film lurking underneath. But it does take a while to get into it.

For those who know Ben Barka only by name and are dimly conscious that there was a scandal then it is a useful illuminant to a sordid piece of French political machination

This book is only for use by the well-informed. Readers coming to it with no background in the history of Russia or the brutal introduction of market 'reforms' during the 80s and 90s will leave it with a badly distorted view of a crucial part of recent history.

Aslund is an apologist for the worst excesses of policies that were unthinkingly introduced by those with only a puerile grasp of economics. As such his book is partial in its argument and grotesquely prejudiced in its conclusions. Perhaps worst of all for a quasi-academic text, Aslund makes sweeping comments that are totally unsupported by fact: Did indeed "many Russians veterans of the Afghan war return as drug addicts and hardened criminals" (p 34)? Or was it their economic circumstances after their return (brought about by the 'reforms') that turned some of them into one or both?

It takes great facility in a foreign language to convincingly produce a completely bogus argument by reference to facts. Dr Aslund is to be congratulated on his command of English if not his wisdom as evidenced by his arguments.

Elegantly written and studiously constructed this is a hatchet job of the first order. Burlesquoni is the Economist's name for the italian premier and Ginsborg does an excellent job in showing how the Italian polity has descended into a farcical pastiche of democracy. Worth ten conventional academic text-books there is a whole history of post-war Italy's descent laid bare in a slim 200 pages. Excellent

A few slips mar this book and jar the narrative -- do female cellists habitually wear blood-red nail varnish? did Sealink ferries really exist under that name in 1956? can you get a double first in a PPE when its not a double honours degree? - but it becomes, after a slightly discursive first half, a real page turner. The story doesn't really get going until the middle, with much of the first half of the book spent on laying down the clues that will be developed in part 2. But it's a clever and well-written story full of elegantly-placed twists. Read until the very last page -- the last sentence has the slickest twist of all.

On the evidence of this book, Eva Joly is a woman of remarkable intelligence, moral courage and fortitude. Claude Chabrol has turned some of Joly's story into a film -- A Comedy of Power

It was obviously written as some form of catharsis -- in a remote cabin in the Norwegian countryside -- and as such it takes the form of a simple recounting of the events without much embellishment. But it could have been so much more with only a little extra information -- much like Chabrol's film. The book and the film suffer from the same failing: they are best understood by an audience or readership who are already familiar with the background to the events, since both are completed in a sort of thought-shorthand that gives little background of support to the events that occurred. There are two further shortcomings: in the film the characters are barely sketched; in the book's case the translation is adequate but occasionally clumsy.

The story she recounts of corruption in high places in the French State is a disturbing one. For the generalist reader this is an interesting sidelight on France and French culture. But for those who might be interested in more specific detail, it would have benefited from more information on some of the background of the Elf-Aquitaine affair; some legal explanation and some filling-in of the details of the major actors in the story. But when taken together with Johnson and Orange's book "The Man Who Tried to Buy the World" about the rise and fall of Vivendi it is still a useful quick introduction to modern French corporate culture.