The row about whether Paul Wolfowitz should step down as president of the World Bank has nothing to with Iraq. But it also has everything to do with Iraq. How so? Well, as even inattentive readers of the FT will have noticed, Mr Wolfowitz is in a spot of bother about the salary and job he helped to arrange for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza.

Those calling for his resignation (including the FT) argue that it is untenable for a man who has made the fight against corruption the centre-piece of his time at the bank, to hang onto the presidency in these circumstances.

None of that has anything to do with Iraq. But it would also be naïve to suppose that people’s attitudes to Wolfowitz are not deeply coloured by his central role in the origins of the Iraq war.

Five years ago, just before the final round of the 2002 French presidential election, I went to see Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front candidate, address an election rally in front of the Paris Opera House. I was not the only curious foreigner in the crowd. Le Pen had also drawn in far-right zealots from all over Europe – I spotted people carrying Flemish, Spanish and Italian flags. And these guys were the real deal – genuine fascists. When I asked the Italian standing next to me whether he was a supporter of the Alleanza Nazionale – the party once regarded as the heirs to Mussolini – he reacted indignantly, and made it clear that he regarded the AN as sell-outs. No, he proudly informed, he was a supporter of Forza Nuova – a much harder-line far-right outfit.

I have a guilty pleasure. One of the literary forms I most enjoy is the savage book review. The pleasure is a guilty one because you cannot avoid feeling a twinge of pity for the victim. Imagine the mortification: you spend months or years, labouring away on a book. And what do you get in return – public vilification and humiliation.

But the author of a truly savage book review is still performing a public service. If you publish a book, you are asking to be taken seriously. A “good” bad review does precisely this. It engages with the text far more vigorously than the usual tepid praise by a reviewer who has flicked quickly through a volume. And the best savage reviews are usually very funny. All of the four articles that I link to below – by Garrison Keillor, Robert Kagan, Matt Taibbi and Clive Crook – made me laugh out loud. This post is really just a way of drawing them to your attention.

Some politicians have got it, and some don’t. On Friday I watched Nicolas Sarkozy give a speech at a hotel in Paris – and he definitely has it. Sarko – who is leading in the polls for the French presidential election (the final round is on May 6th) – was masterful. By turns he was funny, rousing, aggressive and engaging.

Of course the audience – a group of young French entrepreneurs – was tailor-made for Sarkozy. This above all is the group that is crying out for change and reform, and that is totally receptive to Sarko’s famous call for a “rupture” with the old way of doing things. But one of the impressive aspects of Sarkozy’s performance was the way in which he didn’t totally truckle to his audience. At one point he attacked the use of “golden parachutes” (he used the English term) for chief executives leaving companies. His audience was initially fairly guarded in its response. But Sarko spotted one man in the audience who was applauding – singled him out – and said that this man had understood that the argument for capitalism could not be won, unless the French people knew that the system was just. Cue thunderous applause.