THE LAW OF LIABILITY INSURANCE. Malcolm A Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Commercial Contract Law, Emeritus Fellow in Law, St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Informa Law, London (2013) xxxii and 158 pp, plus 1 p Bibliography and 4 pp Index. Hardback £290.

This is the latest addition to the Informa Law Library series on insurance law and is the work of the editor-in-chief of the series, Professor Malcolm Clarke. In keeping with his major practitioner work (The Law of Insurance Contracts), Professor Clarke’s gaze continues in a decidedly westerly direction, from the foundations laid by English law towards laws adopted in the “New World” of the USA and in Canada; alongside, there is comparative guidance on other common law jurisdictions, notably that of Australia. The thrust of the work is to compare and to contrast laws across these jurisdictions so far as concern those general principles of insurance law as are most relevant to liability insurance. Simultaneously published in England, USA and in Canada (which fact no doubt explains the publishers’ decision to adopt US style English—no, dear English-based reader, those are not typos) and written in Professor Clarke’s customary lucid, precise and engaging style, the text is a distillation of much that appears in his compendium loose-leaf work. This is a slim and portable text, running to no more than 158 pages, all divided into short sections within each chapter. Little is stated with conviction without supporting cross-references—such referencing runs to over 1,000 notes and, if the reader is left wanting more, further sources are readily presented. The style and approach thus makes the work easily digested and a reliable source of guidance as to general principles. Readers seeking detailed specific commentary on particular types of liability insurance, be they RTA, EL, PI, products or public liability, will use this text as the beginning of a quest for knowledge rather than as the answer to all prayers; this is a text about “black letter law” rather than as to matters of procedure and practice. That said, the impression is not that of being “short-changed” in any way: the guidance is uncluttered and results in the clearest of exposition.

In the preface, Professor Clarke quotes a reference in the Financial Times to the work of the book reviewer as the “thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”. He adds the expressed hope that his readers love cats. Suffice to say that no felines have been placed at any risk during the course of this review.