Otto von Bismarck took the view (or so German urban legend has it) that laws were like sausages; however much we liked them, they should preferably not be seen in the making. Until about ten years ago, one could have been forgiven for thinking that English lawyers adopted much the same approach to the law of assignment of things in action. It might be the vital bedrock supporting business sales, factoring in all its flavours and indeed a large part of the whole area of corporate finance; it might besides be a small but vital cog in the wheel of construction and design law. But for all the burgeoning case law on the subject there was little written about it, and that mostly low-grade and rather uninspired.

Things are, of course, very different today, We now have highly thoughtful and scholarly books on assignment by Greg Tolhurst and Marcus Smith (the latter in its second edition), neither of which shies away from analysis, argument or tendentiousness; and this is not to mention an excellent piece of work by Robert Anderson on the Scots law of assignation, which in its elegance of exposition shows up a good deal of English law for the illogical and chaotic mess that it is.

Tony Guest's new work adds to this renaissance; but it does so in a rather different mould from what has gone before. It is not a monograph so much as a straight textbook in the mould unfashionable since the 1980s. We have here a large volume aimed squarely at the practitioner seeking a statement of the law on a particular topic, together with all the relevant material bearing on it, but who has neither the leisure for speculation nor much concern about whether we might be better off if we did, or thought about, things differently. For this purpose, the arrangement of the new work is ideally suited. Definitions; statutory assignments; equitable assignments; the meaning of “subject to equities”, and so on: all march in step, one after the other, in tidy and logical order. Following them there are other