With a flurry of new books and no literary agents to fight your corner, one way to attract attention as a novelist in France is to be a teenager. Over the next few weeks, as more than 700 novels are released in time for the annual "rentrée littéraire" Carmen Bramly will stand out from the crowd. At 15, she is this year's youngest contributor.

Former deputy prime minister John Prescott privately harboured doubts about the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he disclosed today.

A former French Interior minister and mentor of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy appeared in a special court in Paris yesterday on three separate corruption charges.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin were once, supposedly, brothers in arms at the court of King Jacques.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was the most famous anthropologist of his generation, and one of the leading intellectuals in post-war France. His writings inspired a major intellectual movement, and at least two of his books have already become classics of French literature. He was largely responsible for the development of social anthropology in France.

Former French President Jacques Chirac has been ordered to stand trial in an alleged corruption scandal dating back to his tenure as Paris mayor, a judicial official said today.

The former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin yesterday dismissed claims that he sought to smear the future president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2004.

A 10-year investigation into alleged embezzlement of public funds by the former French president Jacques Chirac may end in a damp squib.

The former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was the leading figure in a “cabal” which tried to smear Nicolas Sarkozy in 2004 to destroy his chances of becoming president, a French investigative judge has been told.