It is with this quotation from that universally respected doyen of the London reinsurance market and formidable veteran expert witness in so many merciless reinsurance battles in the Commercial Court, Robert Kiln, that the authors of this excellent book begin their chapter “Introduction to the Reinsurance Market”. But they are no strangers to those enormous litigation battles to the death in the course of which the finest minds in the legal profession investigate for day after day and week after week the meaning of all three lines of the reinsuring clause in the slip, precisely what share of the risk was meant to be accepted, the exact order in which the documents were placed in the brokers’ file, whether the placing information was all shown to the underwriter eight years previously and, even if it was, what it was to be understood as meaning. Nobody in London knows this kind of litigation better than Dr Terry O’Neill. And that I can say with total confidence, having worked with him again and again as my instructing solicitor in my former combatant role.

What about Bermuda, though? There is no less a smell of the cordite of reinsurance litigation there. That is the home of captive reinsurance vehicles and of reinsurers of otherwise unplaceable risks to be laid off 100% through the London market with reinsurance corporations thirsty for premium income from the side streets of Seoul and the tower blocks of Taipei. But Bermuda was always eventually going to be the most favourable environment for this kind of inventive facility. After all, in which other capital city in the world can you find one of the main thoroughfares called Front Street? Jan Woloniecki is a member of a distinguished Bermudan specialist law firm founded to service the burgeoning reinsurance industry on that island.

Combining in one book the reinsurance law of England and Bermuda is therefore an excellent idea. Inasmuch as the London and Bermuda markets are so closely connected, it is invaluable for specialists in this field to have one book of reference for both jurisdictions.

The field of reinsurance is notorious for the use in slips and cover notes not only of market jargon but of abbreviations of sometimes confusing obscurity. In case of dispute as to the meaning of the words used it is not unusual for expert market evidence to be called. One of the awkward problems encountered is that not infrequently there is a very real disparity between what the contracting parties have tried to create and the normal principles of English contract law as worked out in other fields. This book in the section on the “Interpretation of Reinsurance Contracts” gives an extremely helpful exposition of the approach which has been taken by the courts to one of the more perplexing areas of contractual construction.

One of the most difficult aspects of reinsurance law encountered by the legal profession and the courts in recent years has been the meaning and application of “follow the settlements of the reinsured” clauses and, in connection with that, the extent to which it is open to a reinsurer to

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