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An outstanding book which lays bare through the featured character Louis Darquier -- phonetically an appropriate name for this era of French history -- 'de Pellepoix' (like the man a falsehood seized from more illustrious historical personalities) this stain on a proud nation. Essentially this drunkard, fantasist and bar brawler...bar room bore to boot ..'rose' to be appointed Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the collaborationist Vichy administration. Astonishing is the overt anti-Semitism espoused not just in cafes and the streets but in the established French press in the 1930's...Prime Minister Leon Blum attacked for his religion being the reason for the failings of his government...etc...he was to survive incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp. Tens of thousands of others were not so fortunate as they were rounded up by French police and sent via Drancy and other horrific halfway camps in France to their deaths. Darquier is all for that but his propensity for spending as little time as possible in the office led to him being a bit player in the process, though, he was just as responsible. However his willingness to deliver vile anti-Semitic speeches made him the perfect fall guy for the ruthlessly ambitious highly efficient Rene Bousquet and his boss Prime Minister Pierre Laval as well as Marshal Petain who ensured the trains left packed with Jews including babies. There is the most chilling debate amongst them of whether children should be included with Bousquet recalling youngsters after releasing a group and effectively condemning them to death. There are heart-rending scenes of the parents being separated from their children by French guards at a camp. Laval was executed -- though Callil says Petain should have joined him and rightly so as he was the bigger villain of the piece the man who set himself up as the protector of the nation but did not lift a finger to save the Jews -- Bousquet shamefully escaped the firing squad and was protected for decades by the French establishment primarily by Francois Mitterrand. If ever there was a more evil personality it is Bousquet whose serene successful post war career -- he ended up as director of the Bank Of Indochina -- was rudely interrupted when Darquier late in life living in exile in Madrid gave an interview declaring that the round ups and deportations were all Bousquet which was perhaps a rare occasion when the monocled anti-Semite spoke the truth. Mitterrand's 'ignorance' of the deportations and cruelty to the Jews is also exposed his sister was the mistress of a senior official in Darquier's Commission and his brother married the niece of the leader of far right group The Cagoule Eugene Deloncle. Protection to loathsome war criminals extended to established French companies such as L'Oreal -- Eugene Schueller the head of the company appointed two of Cagoule's murderers Deloncle's right hand man Jacques Correze head of their US operation till the 1990's and Deloncle's 'top gun' Jacques Filliol ran the Spanish franchise...Mitterrand himself worked for the company. As for the Taittinger champagne family would imagine Pierre-Charles, who bought the company in 1931, is not mentioned a far right zealot and who extracted from Darquier through being head of the Paris Council 'interesting Jewish businesses' for his brother-in-law Louis Burnouf -- he ended up with 16. As Callil acidly remarks Taittinger he asked for more in December 1943 "he had a large family." Even more astonishing as Callil observes when the end was nigh for Vichy and the Nazis in Paris "Taittinger's transformation into a resistant was one of the most startling of the war." It is a truly brilliant book, superbly written not without humour -- largely aimed at the appalling ludicrous Darquier as well as his fantasist alcoholic Australian wife Myrtle. The impact of the subject all the more powerful because of the way it came about...Callil spent seven years being treated by a female psychiatrist in London...one day she went round for an appointment ..no answer...turned out she had died aged 40 the author believes it was suicide though it was officially declared an "accidental death"...her name Anne Darquier daughter of Louis and Myrtle but left in the hands of Elsie an adoring nanny/nurse in England. She grew up despising her mother but believing in the legend her father was a Baron...that is till she went to visit him in Madrid post war and his true base self revealed itself to her. "There are some things and some people you can never forgive," she remarked to Callil shortly after her visit. An appropriate summary for Darquier 'de Pellepoix', and all the other singularly unattractive brutal and sociopathic characters that made up Vichy and the Paris based collaborators so brilliantly exposed and brought to life by Callil in his masterpiece.