The Admiralty practitioner has been greeted in recent months by three workmanlike and rather welcome books. Two are English, and deal specifically with collisions; the third is American, and has a somewhat wider appeal.

First, there is Holdert and Buzek’s Collision Cases—Judgments and Diagrams. Unashamedly simple in conception, this is a collection—oddly enough, by two practising Dutch lawyers—of headnotes from some hundred selected collision cases reported in Lloyd’s Law Reports, together with diagrams of what happened. The diagrams are extremely clear and well drawn; where necessary, close-ups are used for the more complicated manoeuvres. Now, this work is clearly not intended to break any new ground in scholarship; nor will it tell the practitioner anything he does not know—or at least anything he cannot find out. Where it does score is in two respects. First, it provides a very handy ready reference to the facts of major collision cases for those whose time is too precious to spend constantly visiting office or chambers library and seeking out the appropriate volume of Lloyd’s. Secondly, and more importantly, the practitioner armed with this work will save vast amounts of time which otherwise would have been spent translating the facts as given in Lloyd’s into a picture of the situation that can be understood at a glance. The physical facts, after all, of a collision case are normally surprisingly simple; it is the legal principle of the judgments that matter, and which the busy practitioner should spend his time on understanding.