Reviews

Dominic Regan and Sean Jones suggest the best restaurants to visit in order to obtain good wine at a fair price.  

You have cause to celebrate. Perhaps you have just been paid for that case you did late last century. The proverbial moron in a hurry can find good wine but the art is to find it at a fair price. Here are some suggestions. 

A powerful and thought provoking film, finds Felicity Gerry  

In the Land of the Free is the sort of thought provoking film which does not require a hemp shirt. A powerful film, which suffers the disadvantage of being labelled a documentary, about three prisoners held for decades in solitary confinement in an American prison. The film received its European Premiere at Curzon Cinema Soho on 25 March as part of the 14th Human Rights Watch Film Festival sponsored by Time Out and followed by a discussion moderated by Terry Waite CBE who gave a moving account of his own detention. Human Rights Watch has published several reports on prison facilities in the United States of America (for further information visit: www.hrw.org/en/united-states/us-program/prison-and-detention-conditions). 

David Wurtzel believes the cast deftly balances the personal with the political and imitate without mimicking the historical figures.  

“The promise” is the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 which said that the British Government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. It lies at the heart of Ben Brown’s fine play, performed in the round at the Orange Tree. For much of the action, the floor is covered by a map of the Ottoman Empire. Not the least of the many historical ironies which run through the production is the sight of British ministers, sitting in London, carving up that Empire before the First World War has actually been won. 

Sir Brian Neill, Richard Rampton QC, Heather Rogers QC,
Timothy Atkinson, Aidan Eardley
LexisNexis, 3rd edition (Aug 2009), £195.00, ISBN 978-0406178312 

Since the first edition of Duncan and Neill in 1978 the libel landscape has changed dramatically and looks set to continue doing so. Juries are no longer “in the position of sheep loosed on an unfenced common, with no shepherd” as Lord Bingham famously described them. More detailed directions are now commonplace and jury awards correspondingly smaller than in their zenith in the 1980’s; to the considerable relief of the popular press.  

Book review 

Gary Slapper
Wildy, Simmonds and Hill (Dec 2009), £9.99, ISBN 0854900616 

Courts often find themselves confronted with the most unusual aspects of human life. Gary Slapper’s compendium of “weird cases” describes cases drawn from around the globe that stand out from the rest. 

Book review
Felicity Gerry and Catarina Sjölin
Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, January 2010, £69, ISBN 0854900357 

Once a month, between February 1999 and April 2000—usually on a Thursday—a very disparate group of mainly middle-aged men and women met at Queen Anne’s Gate to talk about sex. Known collectively to ourselves—and to the Home Office receptionists—as the “Sex Offenders” we were the members of Jack Straw’s Steering Group, set up to review the law on sex offences. Essentially we were given a blank sheet of paper on which we were encouraged to set out a blueprint for a new sex offences law for the next generation or three. Our report “Setting the Boundaries” contained a total of 62 recommendations. It was published in July 2000. It formed the basis for the government’s Sexual Offences Bill, which received  Royal Assent on 20 November 2003 and came into force on 1 May 2004. Five years later the new case law is beginning to develop—and the books are starting to proliferate. 

David Ormerod, The Right Honourable Lord Justice Hooper
OUP, October 2009, £221.74 978-0-19-557423-0 

This work is now in its 20th edition since its re-incarnation by HHJ Peter Murphy, who has now stood down as Emeritus Editor. Criminal practitioners, and his publishers, owe him a great debt of gratitude. The teams of contributors and editors are immensely strong, providing as near a guarantee as is possible of an accurate, erudite work which combines practical guidance with excellent analysis. 

Ashutosh Khandekar on opera as a virtual experience.  

In his essay Art and Revolution, published in 1849, Richard Wagner first applied the term “Gesamtkunstwerk” to opera —a “universal art form” that draws together many facets of culture and creativity, merging them into a single expressive whole. Had he been writing a century and a half later, Wagner’s choice of word to describe opera, with its heady mix of music, drama, design and, increasingly, technology, might well have been “multimedia”. 

Nigel Pascoe QC shares his personal highlights from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. 

Aficionados of Fringe theatre will recognise two useful tips: scour the Traverse programme and see what Guy Masterson has on the stocks. This year he had ten shows under his belt, acting in one and producing and/or directing the others. Austen’s Women was the ideal warm up to what was my fifteenth year in Edinburgh. Rebecca Vaughan, demurely changing in front of her dressing table, gradually progressed to her ball gown, taking a dozen or so characters in her stride. Enchanting stuff and excellent characterisation. Then Masterson himself in a very atmospheric two-handed thriller: The Sociable Plover was remote bird watching with a difference; homicide, to be precise. Unsurprisingly, it has already been a television film. Masterson is always worth watching and his pedantic and scary psychopath did not disappoint, splendidly supported by Ronnie Toms. 

Max Hardy reviews The Legal Mire, a fundraising event for the Kalisher Scholarship.  

Not withstanding the manifold challenges that face the criminal Bar enduring reassurance can be drawn from the ever growing numbers wishing to join its ranks. Those who embark on the daunting path that leads to the Bar do so because they acknowledge the value that barristers can and do add to society. The spiralling costs associated with making a bid for the Bar will be well known to younger practitioners but by way of example a place on the BVC at City Law School for 2008–2009 costs £13,250.