Life At Court

In this electrifying bestseller, the shrewd and voluble trial lawyer Louis Nizer, who made a long career of representing famous people in famous cases, recounts some of his significant civil and criminal cases. Nizer rose to national fame with his real-life accounts of tension-filled courtrooms and the fervor of the advocate, and “My Life in Court” proved to be no exception: it rose to the top of the Times’s best-seller list on its publication in 1961 and logged 72 weeks as a sales leader. The book is an in-depth collection of some of Mr. Nizer’s court case success stories, including his client Quentin Reynolds’ famous libel action against the columnist Westbrook Pegler, which would also become the basis of the 1963 Broadway play “A Case of Libel.” Praised by critics as “entertaining and philosophically instructive, an unusual combination,” Nizer’s movie-like plots of real-life courtroom drama will keep you captivated until the very last page.

The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England.

Analyses how atmospheres and sentiments shape the workings of international criminal law in (post-)colonial Africa and beyond.

A beloved crime reporter revisits some of her biggest assignments and passes judgement on our judicial system--especially its judges. When Christie Blatchford wandered into a Toronto courtroom in 1978 for the start of the first criminal trial she would cover as a newspaper reporter, little did she know she was also at the start of a self-imposed life sentence. She has been reporting from Canadian courtrooms for the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the National Post ever since. Back in '78, she loved the courts, lawyers and judges, and that persisted for many years. But slowly, surely, she suffered a loss of faith. What happened? It was at the Mike Duffy trial she had the epiphany: That judges are the new senators, unelected, unaccountable and overly entitled. Yet unlike senators, they continue to get away with it because any questioning by government or its agents is deemed an intrusion onto judicial independence. In her explosive new book, Christie Blatchford revisits trials from throughout her career and asks the hard questions--about judges playing with the truth--through editing of criminal records, whitewashing of criminal records, pre-trial rulings that kick out evidence the jury can't hear. She discusses bad or troubled judges--how and why they get picked, and what can be done about them. And shows how judges are handmaidens to the state, as in the Bernardo trial when a small-town lawyer and an intellectual writer were pursued with more vigor than Karla Homolka. For anyone interested in the political and judicial fabric of this country, Life Sentence is a remarkable, argumentative, insightful and important book.

In 'Bowerbird', Sibella Court reveals her very personal and surprising approach to collecting and collections. She shows how to procure the elements of a collection, how to organise and store them, and how to display them in creative and everchanging ways.

She has the voice of an angel, but one false note could send her back to her old life of poverty.Ten-year-old Bess has only ever been good at one thing-singing-but music has no place in her family's world. When her father sells her to the king of England, she balances the loss of all she's known against music and plenty, and builds a new life as a royal minstrel, earning the nickname "the king's songbird."Bess comes of age in the dangerous Tudor court, where the stakes are always high, and where politics, heartbreak, and disease threaten everyone from the king to the lowliest musician.Her life has one constant: Tom, her first and dearest friend. But when Bess intrigues with a young Anne Boleyn and strains against the restrictions of court life, will she discover that the biggest risk of all is listening to her own stubborn heart?

The royal palaces of the Tudor period - Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Greenwich Palace, St James' Palace, Nonesuch, Whitehall and Richmond Palace, amongst others - are the subject of this illustrated book, in which the author examines the way in which Tudor palaces functioned on the inside.