This is a monumental looseleaf work of very wide coverage, the result of extensive and obviously well-coordinated collaboration. Mr Yates’ name is on the title page followed by the names of nine other writers who have been responsible for parts of the book. The book contains sections on carriage of goods by sea including charterparties (by Mr Paul Todd of Cardiff Law School) and bills of lading (largely by Professor Nicholas Gaskell of the University of Southampton), carriage by inland water (Mr Yates himself), carriage by road and rail (Dr Malcolm Clarke, whose work on the CMR Convention is already well known), carriage by air (Mr Nicholas Hughes of Barlow, Lyde & Gilbert), multimodal transport (Mr David Glass of Cardiff Law School) and freight forwarding (Mr Glass again).

The main strategy of the work is to set out certain well-established forms of contract clause and comment on them in order. A slight disadvantage is that the full sets of terms are not given, so that the overall plans of the different sets cannot be taken into account. But this is partly remedied by efficient indexing of those clauses which are reproduced and commented on, which is indeed (since not all the clauses of all the various sets of terms have been chosen for comment) vital. Obviously on some of the clauses the comment cannot do much more than paraphrase the clause: but this is not common. The comment is often very full, and very up-to-date; substantial packages of replacement material have already arrived, posing long tasks for the person responsible for replacing the old pages with the new. The reach is wide, including discussion of the conflict of laws and international Conventions.

I have tested the material by seeking comment on various current issues and found it usually extensive, always relevant, reliable and very up-to-date. But one has to search for general reasoning by locating the particular clause to which it is attached; and when the book has given the reader the information, the reader is left to make appropriate use or development of it. This is not a criticism, but a necessary consequence of this type of commentary: the skilful maintenance of indexing is necessary, and the reader has to be prepared to be patient. The format means that the reader must in the end depend on himself or herself for deducing the principles to be applied to a particular dispute and for taking overviews.

It is true to say that most of the material is also expounded elsewhere: so whether these expositions, which are in a new format, are more or less useful than those already existing is something which professional users alone will judge. There is however not much elsewhere on demise charters (though these are not in fact contracts for the carriage of goods) and the Barecon forms, so this discussion can be specially useful, though I in fact found it a bit disappointing. The case of The Stena Nautica (No. 2) [1982] 2 Lloyd’s Rep. 336, for example, which raised (though without solving) the whole question of the proprietary or possessory interest conferred by such a chatter, does not appear in the table of cases. (The topic is usefully discussed in another, and valuable, Lloyd’s of London Press book, Interests in Goods, eds Palmer and McKendrick, published in the same year.) But in such a huge work there is bound to be unevenness of coverage