Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969) took a First at Oxford, joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907, and spent nearly twenty years as a hanging judge in Burma, where, toward the end of his long career, he was a contemporary of George Orwell’s. Gilbert once sentenced a Burmese to death for murder, but after the man used political influence to escape the penalty, Gilbert chatted affably with him when they met. Gilbert also had a brief stint in Mesopotamia in 1918-19, two years after T. E. Lawrence tried to bribe the Turkish generals to raise the siege of Kut. In his introduction to Gilbert’s Paris Journal, Thomas Staley writes: “Although Burma was an English colony, a version of French remained the practical language of civil administration.” But Burma was not a British colony; it was administered as part of India until 1937. Though adjacent to Indo-China, it had never been under French rule and remained independent until the British finally conquered the country after the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. Under British rule, as one would expect and as Orwell and Maurice Collis’s Trials in Burma (1938) confirm, English was the language of civil administration. (Less serious errors occur on page 90, where the names of Stanley Spencer and Geoffrey Wolff are misspelled, and on page 51, where “alla Lucia” is correct in Italian and requires no tedious sic.) Much more is needed in the brief introduction, especially since the book itself is so short, on Gilbert’s background,