Reviews

Kapil Summan was greatly impressed by East West Street and spoke to the author about current threats to human rights. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, scientist Jared Diamond cites 20 genocides since 1950, arguing that “genocide has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for mil

Churchill and Ireland Churchill’s close links to Ireland and his involvement in Irish politics have been somewhat underplayed in most biographies, a state of affairs that is remedied in Paul Bew’s concise but thorough book.

Our ideas of Paris during the war may well have been shaped from the film Casablanca. "Well, Rick, we’ll always have Paris…" Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) says. But I would doubt few, if any of us, would have paused to consider what Paris actually meant for those living there in the period of the Second

Scottish advocate Stephen O'Rourke is impressed with a new biography of the great barrister Marshall Hall. This life of ‘The Great Defender’ and Conservative MP Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC (1858-1927) is a fascinating read, beautifully written by another English silk, Sally Smith QC.

Justice (terminally) delayed... In her excellent book Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzelmann recounts that Horace Alexander, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi’s, once wrote “I sometimes think our greatest crime against India was to turn all her best sons into lawyers.”

Scottish lawyer Brian Inkster of Inksters Solicitors enjoys a fascinating account of the Highland Clearances but is angered at the parallels with the conduct of the Crofting Commission of today. In Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances James Hunter masterly weaves together a fascinati

Professor Hector MacQueen of the University of Edinburgh writes for our sister publication, Scottish Legal News, about a new biography of the influential philosopher David Hume which he finds absorbing and worthy of the great man. Long ago I was introduced to the philosophy of David Hume (1711-76) b

The gavel, a device never used in the English courts, features on the cover of Confessions of a Barrister – and is a harbinger of things to come. The book is an anonymised account of the trials and travails of criminal barrister, “Russell Winnock”, who called in 1999. But, the title notwithsta

It may surprise some readers that the last Communard of this title is not Jimmy Somerville, the shrill voice of the 1980s, but Adrien Lejeune who as a young free-thinker reluctantly took the side of the Commune revolutionaries when the people of Paris rose up against the reactionary French governmen

  What Paintings Say is a wonderful study of 100 masterpieces, lavishly illustrated and packed with history presented in an accessible and readable way.

Tom Bower is a barrister turned investigative journalist, a species that is all but extinct in modern Britain. He has produced a string of debunking biographies of the rich and famous and has successfully defended libel actions from the likes of Richard Branson, Robert Maxwell and Richard Desmond. M

GIllian Mawdsley is impressed by Cal Flynn's first novel – inspired by the discovery that one of her ancestors was Angus McMillan, the leader of the notorious Highland Brigade that massacred aborigines in 19th century Australia while Connor Beaton delves into the darker side of the Internet to exp