It is well known that every non-reflexive $M$-ideal is weakly compactly generated (in short, WCG). We present a family of Banach spaces $\{V_{s}:0 \lt s \lt 1\}$ which are not WCG and such that every $V_{s}$ satisfies the inequality

$$ \|\f\|\geq\|\pi\f\|+s\|\f-\pi\f\|\quad\forall\f\in V_{s}^{\ast\ast\ast}, $$

where $\pi$ is the canonical projection from $V_{s}^{\ast\ast\ast}$ onto $V_{s}^{\ast}$. In particular, no $V_{s}$ can be renormed to be an $M$-ideal.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 46B20