Marcel Berlins
Words From the Bench
Ashes and Sparks: Essays on Law and Justice
By Stephen Sedley
Cambridge University Press 446pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
There is something about the law that renders the vast majority of its practitioners, be they judges or lawyers, incapable of writing about their world in language understandable by those not of the profession. It’s not so much the vocabulary of the law that mystifies, though that is a factor, but a way of employing words and constructing sentences which the lay reader finds somewhere between stilted and impenetrable.
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'The poem leads us, but no person takes us by the hand. It is not like Virgil or Homer, whose poems start with invocations to a muse.'
Michael Schmidt on the Epic of Gilgamesh.
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'The Bible is all but silent on yellow, as it is on most colours.'
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'Houses always reveal something of their occupants, but none so much as writers’ houses.'
Frances Wilson goes from Keats House to Dove Cottage and beyond.
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