The third edition of this work continues to display the strengths of the first two editions. It remains a clear, logical and precise account of the various laws applicable to State and Diplomatic Immunity. Applicable rules derived from common law, statute and treaty are dissected, analysed and compared. The work is carefully structured and designed into a series of short chapters, and within those chapters into a series of sections designed to be user friendly to busy practitioners, advisers and diplomats. After a general introduction, Book 1 deals with State Immunity, and Book 2 deals with Diplomatic and Consular Immunity. An additional chapter has been added which outlines some aspects arising from the multiplicity of litigation that followed the demise of the International Tin Council. The Appendices contain the key statutory and treaty provisions.

Building on a period of judicial activism, the State Immunity Act of 1978 put United Kingdom law firmly in the camp of those states advocating the restrictive theory of state immunity. The adoption of the Act, according to the author, “brought the law of the United Kingdom into line with that of most other civilized countries” (p. 11). While the restrictive theory may well be “manifestly suited to commercial realities” (p. 11), to suggest that it is the only “civilized” approach is not, to my mind, an appropriate designation from a legal perspective. Nonetheless, it may well prove to be one of the long-term benefits of the political revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (to a lesser extent) in 1989–1990 that the adoption of more market-orientated economic reforms leads to a greater acceptance of the restrictive immunity theory, even from states such as the Soviet Union, which have traditionally favoured the absolutist theory.

The fact that United Kingdom case law on the State Immunity Act 1978 has been relatively scarce renders more invaluable the comparative analysis of decisions from various other jurisdictions employed by the author. The comparisons are often helpful, but the technique of the author is generally simply to draw the attention of the reader to the salient ruling in the case and leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. I consistently thought that I would have welcomed the authors’ views on whether the approaches adopted in various cases from different jurisdictions were sensible, overly restrictive, or whatever. This cautious approach is very much a characteristic of this book. Occasionally illustrative examples are given and these are particularly useful, for example, that on p. 35 relating to the determi-