Professor Yates’ Exclusion Clauses in Contracts will probably be familiar to many readers outside the student and academic market at which it is primarily aimed. Yates and Hawkins, hardly surprisingly, shows some family resemblance but is not by any means a simple enlargement and reworking of the material contained in the earlier book; it is a practitioner’s guide of high quality to a vital area of commercial law in which a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing for the practitioner and his client alike. It would deserve to command a substantial market whatever the competition, but in the absence of any direct rival it should appear in every commercial library. Its subject is one where a proper perspective is difficult to maintain—the busy lawyer will face the problem of combining principles of general application with the special characteristics of particular types of contract and the special needs of particular clients. No single textbook can ever replace the professional skill and judgment which this entails, but it can make their exercise a great deal easier and better informed by treating “exclusions”, quasi-exclusions, indemnity clauses, and “related devices” as subjects in their own right and not merely as a baggage train following an account of contract in general or of particular contracts. To do so, it must speak with authority on the general and the particular alike, and in this respect it can be said that one of the major strengths of Yates and Hawkins lies in its authors’ knowledge and understanding of a very wide range of commercial dealings in the context of which the “exclusion and related devices” may appear—the synthesis of general and particular is complete. Hand in hand with an authoritative text go examples of particular clauses on which the reader as well as the authors can sharpen their teeth. Some of the clauses are good, some indifferent, and a few are examples of what not to do. The last category is not—of course—the responsibility of the authors, who merely use them by way of illustration. They will, no doubt, accept some responsibility for the specimen