Category Archives: legal history

Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)

Ernie, before his unfortunate demise due to being hit in the eye by a stale pork pie thrown by his love rival Ted the baker, was noted for the speed of his milk cart. He and his horse Trigger “galloped into market street” which sounds rather dangerous, especially if it was contemporary, for at the… Read More »

1968 swinging with The Scaffold

1968 may have been the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  but the year’s events had given scant scope for celebration: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the end of the Prague Spring, assassinations in the US (Martin Luther King Jr in April, Robert F Kennedy in June), anti-terrorism… Read More »

Elizabeth I: her path to the throne

A little over 457 years ago, on the 15th January 1559, Elizabeth I was crowned the Queen of England and Ireland in Westminster Abbey. She succeeded to the throne 59 days earlier, on the 17th November 1558. That succession and coronation led to a stable monarchy lasting more than 44 years. Elizabeth’s father was Henry VIII… Read More »

Decentring the Bodleian Law Library at Christmas with the help of Sokurov’s Russian Ark

My Christmas film is Russian Ark.  In one lingering ‘take’, the film leads us through the Hermitage in a series of dreamlike sequences, like the thread that guided Theseus through the labyrinth, until we arrive not at the Minotaur, but at a magnificent Romanov Ball. The film brilliantly negotiates 300 years of history as the… Read More »