On the right of this picture is the British novelist, Peter James, receiving the Prix Coeur Noir, France's leading award for crime fiction. Or as the PR agency Midas headlines its release: French beaten on home turf for major literary prize by plucky Brit. You can read him in English and German too.

I mentioned the party we held on Australia Day to celebrate the careers of Geoff Todd and Mike Barnard, two long-serving Macmillan directors. I'm not sure they'll thank me for this but here are photos of them at the party. Geoff is the Burns lookalike, Mike with the guitar.

Finally, to round out the Macmillan top sellers for 2006, here is the list of our top twenty English language teaching  courses in unit sales order. For obvious commercial reasons I'm not publishing the actual numbers but I have been allowed to say that the first course in the list had sales of 50,513,200 in the year. The others were slightly less, but some pretty impressive numbers nonetheless. It's hard to link each of these individually but you can see a good selection at Macmillan English.