Old-fashioned divines used as a matter of course to compose their sermons around particularly edifying passages from Holy Writ. You read the quotation, you digested the commentary that told you what it meant and why certain bits of it were unusually significant, and then you came away (with a bit of luck) both informed and inspired by what you had heard. History books of the type lampooned in 1066 and All That were written on much the same lines. The theme of the chapter on (say) Henry VIII would be briefly stated, then followed by a satisfactorily detailed exegesis of what it was all about.

Perhaps a little more surprisingly, a few English law books still continue to follow a similar pattern. Like Scrutton on Charterparties and Dicey & Morris on the Conflict of Laws, Bowstead & Reynolds carries on the tradition of reducing the law into lapidary code-size chunks (125 of them in this case), followed by the kind of expert commentary that practitioners find essential, and which academics have learnt to expect from the Common Law Library.

And the odd thing is that, in the hands of an acknowledgedly expert editor, this format works extraordinarily well. Indeed, in this reviewer’s opinion it is particularly appropriate in a book on agency law. Despite being a part of our law that commercial practitioners have to manipulate and argue the whole time, we often forget that the principles of agency and representation are some of the most disordered, chaotic and plain obscure to be found in English jurisprudence. They have to be extracted from a vast collection of conflicting and at times incomprehensible authorities, with few if any agreed ideas behind them. Furthermore, they form one of the diminishing parts of English law which have undergone remarkably little in the way of external tidying-up, either by statute or by well-meaning but inept Euro-regulation (though there are, as always, exceptions). In circumstances such as these, the best way to impose some kind of rational order on the subject is by tentative statements of the law, followed by discursive analysis—even if, as all too frequently happens, the eventual conclusion is that the matter remains uncertain.

Producing the new Bowstead, as ever, has involved two things: keeping up with developments where the law has actually been moving along, and revising coverage in certain areas which the editor now feels uncomfortable with the existing treatment. As for the former, a good deal of new thought has rightly gone into the effect of agency on accessory liability (vital in the increasingly topical context of money-laundering litigation since El Ajou ) and on how we deal with notice and knowledge obtained through underlings (always important, but oddly neglected hitherto as a subject of serious study). Rightly, the old authorities which tend to encrust books of this sort have come in for a deal of scepticism, and the statements of law in them have been scrutinized and given a properly contemporary twist. Another area that has woken from long torpor is agents as fiduciaries: as any disappointed lender trying to recover its shortfall from a solicitor will tell you, a finding of breach of fiduciary duty is a great help. Hence issues such as what a fiduciary duty is, how it differs

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