A strange act caught everyone's attention after a French academician was under investigation for inventing a Nobel-style prize for philology in order that he could then go on to win it.

Florent Montaclair, from Besançon in eastern France, was decorated with the Gold Medal of Philology in 2016 at a ceremony held at the National Assembly in Paris, attended by ministers and Nobel laureates.

But the prize was a fiction, as was the body that supposedly awarded it, the International Society........

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