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The sea was calm; the view stretched out to the east. Cambodia was probably on the other side, or maybe Vietnam. There was a yacht, midway to the horizon; perhaps there are millionaires who spend their time sailing back and forth across the oceans of the world; a life at once monotonous and romanti…

I had a go with another American bestseller, Total Control, by David G Baldacci; but that was even worse. This time, the hero wasn't a lawyer but a young computer genius who worked a hundred and ten hours a week. His wife, on the other hand, was a lawyer and worked ninety hours a week: they had a k…

[...] Half-heartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages, skipped back fifty; by chance I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit: Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the pro…

[...] Meanwhile, people were working, making useful commodities; or sometimes useless commodities. They were productive. What had I produced in the forty years of my existence? To tell the truth, not very much. I had managed information, facilitated access to it and disseminated it; sometimes, too,…

In the years that followed, pork prices continued to plummet. There were farmers' protests, marked by a desperate violence; tons of slurry were dumped on the Esplanade des Invalides, a number of pigs were gutted in front of the Palais Bourbon. At the end of 1986, the government announced emergency …