Conor Gearty

Blair’s speeches over the last three years on the international community and the role of Britain within it reveal a consistent commitment not just to pre-emptive military action but also to international law; the achievement of a settlement in the Middle East; and a continuation of the US-UK special relationship. All three have been more or less publicly shredded by the US, leaving in place only the UK’s commitment to attack Iraq.

Invading countries, bombing from the air, destroying property, attacking people on enemy ground, killing, maiming and so on, are covered by a different law altogether . . . Not only is this law nowhere to be found in the Armed Forces Act, it is not in any Act of Parliament of any sort. In fact, it is nowhere to be found at all.

In 1920 our ‘Mad Mullah’ was Mullah Yussuf Dua Mohammed. Ensconced in British Somaliland, he and his dervishes were the subject of repeated air attacks by an RAF unit. As A.W.B. Simpson writes in one of the early chapters of this sprawling, monumental and sometimes magnificent book, Z Unit was responsible for bombing ‘Medishi Jidali, where there was a fort, and for...

I had been living in England for just eight months when Bobby Sands died in the Maze Prison hospital after spending 66 days on hunger strike. Speaking on the day of his death in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, described him as a ‘convicted criminal’ who ‘chose to take his own life’. This did not stop a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand...

The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering...