Robert Neild argues that throughout history public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Are the political and social forces that then induced reform alive today? What has happened to them?<BR>To explore these questions he looks at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries - France, Germany, Britain and the United States; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; and at developments in the twentieth century, including the widespread use of corruption as a weapon in the Cold War. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.