His lectures were always meticulously prepared skilfully delivered and well received

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His lectures were always meticulously prepared, skilfully delivered and well received. Since 1970 she had held the most prestigious rank in French fashion, President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.Madame Gres' salon, the piano nobile of the north-east corner building of the Place Vendome, was unique. Madame Gres was haute couture's sphinx; a silent, dignified and seemingly asexual creature who held within her the secret of techniques of an art which stretched back to antiquity. Ther e were other costs as well in the neglect of the Algerian question, of the Empire, of the Indo-China war and the postponed problem of the European Defence Community.Although a conservative in a party associated with colonial diehards, Pinay supported indpendence for Morocco and did not support the "last-ditch" aim of keeping Algeria French. Within six years he was paying his own way through Tokyo's Waseda university, all the time keeping one eye open for the main chance.His luck (or genius) was to seek his fortune in land. Outside the cities, Japan was mountainous, undeveloped and cheap; Yasujiro treated it like a giant Monopoly board. But the chapters on theirfather form the most fascinating part of this unlikely family saga.Yasujiro was a monster of such superb ambition and arrogance that even in corruption-riddled Japan it is difficult to work out how he achieved and got away with so much for so long.He was born in 1889 to peasant farmers; 14-year-old Yasu's first business venture was to flog fertiliser carted over from Osaka.

In the West, the Tsutsumi name is best known for the feud between the late man's sons - Seiji, the novelist, poet and founder of the dazzling Seibu department stores, and the younger Yoshiaki who (with a personal fortune estimated at between $10 and $40bn) is easily the richest businessman in the world. Using his private railway network he commissioned a fleet of freight carriages which could be emptied into tanks in rural stations. The "Gold Trains" were unveiled at a formal ceremony attended by cabinet ministers and a crowd of several hundred. Lesley Downer is too polite a biographer to spell it out, but the point is clear enough: Yasujiro Tsutsumi could make money out of anything. The brothers Lesley Downer Chatto & Windus, £20 Exactly 50 years ago, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, founding patriarch of the Seibu business empire, was struggling with a grim problem. After three years of war, Tokyo's reserves of fuel oil were strictly rationed. Even the waste disposal trucks which ferried sewage from household cisterns to farms were marooned in their depots.

Despite food shortages, the city was generating 7 million litres of human waste every day. "Tokyo", Yasujiro recorded in his memoirs, "was under faeces attack." He devised a simple but brilliant solution. The question is, who will be first out of the trenches?The author is professor of health management services at Nottingham University and former director of personnel for the NHS.. What a m u ddle.In reality, therefore, the war the BMA has now apparently declared may be no more than a phony war. What is needed is for one or two trusts to ignore both the politicians and the BMA and start trying to do what they should be doing for themselves in pursuit of improved services. The result has been a Catch-22 situation, with mini s ters unprepared to kill off the central systems before the introduction of local pay in trusts and trusts being unwilling to introduce local pay while the central systems remained intact.This year probably offers the last chance of making any progress at all on local pay before the next General Election. The Chancellor has announced a public sector pay freeze and a requirement to tie all increases to productivity gains; in pursuit of this policy, health ministers have asked the review bodies and the Whitley Councils to recommend no increases for the coming year, but they have also pressed them to accept that some part of any agreement should be tied to local performance.