Malcolm Clarke’s expertise as an insurance contract lawyer is known to both practitioners and courts through his established work on the Law of Insurance Contracts, now in its third edition. The present short work in the Clarendon Law Series tackles insurance from a broader, sociological angle. It is policies in the sense of overall goals which it punningly engages. Only in the middle of its three sections—entitled respectively The Players, The Play and The Wider Scene—does it seek to analyse the law relating to the making of an insurance contract, the scope of cover and the making of claims.

Insurance developed in the commercial—mainly marine—field. It extended into the domestic areas of fire and life insurance, before being given vastly greater currency by the genius of C. E. Heath at the start of this century. The legacy is a body of principle developed in a limited field which has been generally applied in all fields. The weight of insurers (used advisedly to exclude brokers) has been deployed instinctively in opposition to any law reform—with notable success in relation to the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, though at the price, in relation to individuals insuring in their private capacity, of issuing informal Statements of Standard Insurance Practice which modify the law’s strictness in practice and, in relation to all individual insureds, of establishing in 1981 the impressively effective Insurance Ombudsman Bureau (discussed by Dr Clarke at pp. 200-209). Dr Clarke, in addition to his academic post at Cambridge, sits on the Bureau’s Council and the preface to this new work attests to the width of opinion which he has canvassed among legal and insurance practitioners. This combines with his customary interest in comparative law. The result is an invitation to participants in insurance, courts and legislatures alike to identify the whys and wherefores of insurance, and to “think it possible that you may be mistaken” in some traditional attitudes.

Nowhere is this invitation more forcefully extended than in the area of misrepresentation and nondisclosure, even though Dr Clarke mars the case at p. 98 by misreading R. A. Hasson’s article on “The Doctrine of Uberrimae Fides” in (1969) 32 MLR 615. It is interesting to speculate how under modem conditions Lord Mansfield would have developed the principles which he expressed, famously and fully, in Carter v. Boehm (1766) 3 Burr. 1905 and, less famously or fully, in Mayne v. Walter (1787, reported in Park’s Law of Marine Insurance of that year). Lord Mansfield combined intellect with innovation and pragmatism. But he retired to his home in Kenwood in 1788 and was dead by 1793, so he certainly did not contradict his previous views, as Dr Clarke suggests, in 1817. Burrough, J., who actually decided the 1817 case of Friere v. Woodhouse 1 Holt N.P. 572 probably did not do so either!

This muddle blurs the valid point made by Hasson (and Dr Clarke in his other work) that subsequent law has taken too stringent a turn. Scrutton, L.J., went so far as to say in Greenhill v. Federal Insurance Co. [1927] 1 K.B. 65, 85 that: “I have always understood the proper line that an underwriter should take, except in matters that he is bound to know, is absolutely to abstain from