I can well remember my relief when I first discovered this book shortly after the publication of its first edition. I had just started work in a P. & I. Club and was completely baffled by the arcana of “off-hire”, “safe port warranties”, “withdrawal” etc. Guided by Wilford, Coghlin and Kimball’s excellent book, this highly technical branch of the law at last began to make sense to me. It achieved the almost impossible alchemy for a practitioner work of combining enough erudition and accessibility to satisfy both the expert and the novice. Subsequent editions have built on these strengths.

Now, seven years after the third edition in 1989, a new edition is available. Since then the law relating to time charters has seen many important developments. In particular there have been the decisions of the House of Lords in The Gregos (1995) and The Kanchenjunga (1990) regarding the effect of the charterer’s giving and the shipowner’s complying with illegitimate orders. There have also been three important decisions of the Court of Appeal: in The Island Archon (1994) on the extent of the shipowner’s implied indemnity against the time charterer; in The Peonia (1991) on the nature of the charterer’s obligations as regards redelivery; and in The Berge Sund (1993) on the effect of time lost due to tank cleaning. The new edition does an excellent job of analysing these decisions and integrating them into the text.

The traditional format has been retained. The work is set out on a clause-by-clause analysis of the NYPE charter, with a section on the applicable English law followed by one on American law. The 1946 form is preferred to NYPE 1993, whose text is nonetheless set out in full at the start of the volume. This is then followed by a similar analysis of the Baltime form. A new feature of the fourth edition is the inclusion of a section covering the English law applicable to Shelltime. This provides a companion to the American law section on the STB form and is intended to redress the balance of previous editions towards dry cargo. A danger of such expansion is that discussion of wet cargo cases, such as The Berge Sund, is now spread out within the work. However, this danger has been avoided by the use of excellent cross-referencing, to match the superlative indexing that has always been a feature of this work.

There are, nonetheless, some oversights which it is the reluctant duty of a reviewer to point out. The section on liens has two unfortunate omissions. There is no reference to The Olib (1991), an important decision on the circumstances in which cargo, over which a lien is being exercised, may be sold. Neither is there any mention of the Companies Act 1989, s. 93, which, when it is eventually brought into effect, will substantially alter the law relating to the registration as charges of charter liens on sub-freights. Furthermore, the implications of some of the more recent decisions are not always fully integrated within other parts of the text. An example is the discussion of The Island Archon on page 294, where the authors correctly state that an indemnity will usually be implied “unless the loss … arises from a risk which, on the true construction of the charter, the owners themselves have agreed to bear”. However, this important qualification is overlooked in the