The Secret Barrister

-

No. I thought it'd be the legal equivalent of 'this is going to hurt" but it wasn't. More mini essays on the history of magistrates and juries. Needed more case studies with those histories woven in. Got bored, couldn't concentrate, stopped listening.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So you've been publicly shamed - Jon Ronson

-
This was ok. Interesting ideas linking twitter shaming to the stocka and thinking about the power of shame in other ways, like in prisons. Quite a lot of padding, I thought, as you followed the author chronologically so you left things then came back to them. Probably could have lost a third of the book, but it was an easy read so I didn't really mind. I don't really get what was so bad about the first example - this man who made up some Bob Dylan quotes. Apparently this mystification makes me typically British. Long term impact of reading the book - going to be realy really careful what I write in this blog.
Read more

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

-
Image
Maybe read it. Lots of ideas and interesting takes on the world. Quite a lot of plot, which said ideas are kind of dumped into. It's a future world where consumption is encouraged with no angst or inkling of the enviromental consequences. So I suppose, in the age of patio heaters and throw away coffee cups, he got that right. Children are conditioned into accepting their social class and their world by the repetition of phrases and some aversion training. Tick again. There's a very interesting idea that women have been conditioned to accept the unnatural. They hate the idea of monogamy and of motherhood. That's an interesting assumption about the natural state of women. The book's not about that though, that's an aside. It's about two men really. One of them is definitely a sympathetic character because he speaks in a lot of Shakespeare quotes, despite being a savage. The real savage are the civilised ones who don't know any Shakespeare. Hmmm. It's...
Read more

Ghengis Khan by Jack Weatherford

-
Image
Yes. Ok I read half this one and fleshing out more detail onto my hazy notion of Ghengis Khan was fascinating - preconception after preconception falling to the floor. Most interesting? Kidnap of women, including his mother by his father, how the Mongol argmy moved (no infantry) - their own supply of food under their saddles. The rules Ghengis Khan had - clever tricks of changing the system so it worked for him, including banning the kidnap of women. Had enough when it moved on to his son, as I was listening to it and I couldn't keep track of the names without seeing them any more.
Read more