Reviews

For over 25 years, John Sweetman worked as a detective garda attached to the Technical Bureau in police headquarters, Dublin. He qualified as a fingerprint expert and later as a security document and handwriting expert. He spent much of his time examining crime scenes, and later scenes of crime exhi

Travel writing, as a literary genre has many guises. The Fodors, Rough Guides, and Baedekers are on-the-hoof advisories. My 1912 Egyptian edition of the latter, for example, advised not shaving on the Nile for fear of your steamer striking a sandbank. James (later Jan) Morris’s 1960 classic on

This book presents an extensive analysis of the judgments delivered in the UK Supreme Court during its first 10 years (2009-2019). Detailed statistical data is provided of how each of the justices voted in a range of different contexts, including cases involving the state, socio-economic underdogs,

The Hollywood template for a successful film has been said to be: ‘Start with an earthquake and build up to the climax of the story’. There is a sense by which Sir David Murray, admittedly on his own narrative, might have selected from a variety of earthquakes with a wide choice of excit

Perhaps the Baltic states, those around the sea there, in recent decades have not been given as full attention as they ought to have. International politics have now changed everything. The core arguments by Oliver Moody are, first, that these states have been forced to develop the kind of resilienc

The vaults of the Antwerp Diamond Centre were thought to be impregnable until, on February 15, 2003, a gang of professional thieves made off with a haul of diamonds worth over £100 million – none have ever been recovered. Patient planning and stunning ingenuity allowed the gang to loot h

An assassination is pre-eminently a political murder; a killing, in itself a crime, has been sanctioned by someone with an interest in the outcome and carried out on their behalf. The traditional British political response to an assassination was to narrow the extent of an apparently preceding consp

Scotland has never quite had an artist like John Bellany, and probably never will again. Correction: delete ‘probably’. His work has had a force and an impact which few of his generation could replicate, and he was so doggedly sui generis that we must hesitate to classify him as simply S

Allan Pinkerton (born Glasgow 1819 – died Chicago 1884) has a complex legacy. Some recall with pride that the Scot was the founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In short, Pinkerton pioneered the enforcement of law and order on the American frontier, upheld principles of gender eq

Douglas Ross KC reviews the latest instalment in Philippe Sands KC's "loose trilogy". Philippe Sands KC is a leading public international lawyer who has moved beyond the realm of practitioner/academic by writing a series of books based on themes of international law and justice aimed at a wider audi

This substantial work is a study of the intellectuals who migrated to Britain during the 1930s from countries in Central and Eastern Europe that were overrun by fascism. It was thought that between 1933 and 1940 about 100,000 such refugees arrived in Britain, although many merely passed through

Murderland, as a history of extreme crime in particular geographical areas of the United States of America, transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology. Many of the individual criminals discussed in the book are very well-known. It may seem odd, however, to read that in 1972 the city of El Pa

Alastair Tibbs reviews Netflix's new documentary on the Grenfell Tower fire. In the early hours of 14 June 2017, the London sky was ignited. What started as a spark from a faulty fridge soon became the blaze that claimed the lives of 72 men, women and children. It was, however, a perfect storm of ne

Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism was published last year to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first exhibition by 30 artists who rebelled against the stultifying grip of the French art establishment and who jointly ushered in the age of the Im

Recently caught up in the Iberian power failure, Robert Shiels, ponders on the lessons of Oliver Letwin’s prophetic book on the subject. This small book bobbed along for four years after publication, perhaps un-noticed, or ignored in part due to the argument around potential disasters, and pos