The French Secret Services, by Douglas Porch (OUP, £9.99 in UK)

This history runs from the 1890s up to the Gulf War, and it is an unedifying story for the most part. Before 1914, French Intelligence failed to forewarn the High Command about the timing and aims of the Schlieffen Plan, so that France suffered almost ruinous casualties in the first months of fighting. In 1939-40 it was not the intelligence services which were to blame so much as Gamelin, the French C-in-C, who remained obsessed with his project for an advance through Belgium even after repeated warnings that the Germans were likely to hit him at his weak point, the Ardennes. And in the Indo-Chinese War of the 1950s, misleading reports were largely responsible for leading the French Army into DienBien-Phu, where Giap and his seasoned Communist troops soon had it trapped. Bureaucratic divisions and jealousies seem to have had a great deal to do with all these historic misjudgments, for which France paid a grim price in lives and prestige. B.F.