The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story Of The Man Who Sent Charles I To The Scaffold.

Author: Geoffrey Robertson

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $20.00 AUD
  • : 9780701176020
  • : Chatto & Windus
  • : Chatto & Windus
  • :
  • : 0.765664
  • : September 2005
  • : 250mm X 156mm X 38mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 35.0
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  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Geoffrey Robertson
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  • : Hardback
  • : 1
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  • :
  • : 942.06/2
  • :
  • :
  • : 352
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  • : 8
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Barcode 9780701176020
9780701176020

Local Description

2005, First edition, first printing. A very good copy with light rubbing to the spine ends and uniform page tanning. The d/w is near fine with only light bumping to the head of the spine.

Description

Charles I waged civil wars that cost one in ten Englishmen their lives. But in 1649 Parliament was hard put to find a lawyer with the skill and daring to prosecute a king who claimed to be above the law. In the end, they chose the radical lawyer John Cooke, whose Puritan conscience, political vision, and love of civil liberties gave him the courage to bring the king to trial. As a result, Charles I was beheaded, but eleven years later Cooke himself was arrested, tried, and executed at the hands of Charles II.
Geoffrey Robertson, a renowned human rights lawyer, provides a vivid new reading of the tumultuous Civil War years, exposing long-hidden truths: that the king was guilty, that his execution was necessary to establish the sovereignty of Parliament, that the regicide trials were rigged and their victims should be seen as national heroes. Cooke's trial of Charles I, the first trial of a head of state for waging war on his own people, became a forerunner of the trials of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. The Tyrannicide Brief is a superb work of history that casts a revelatory light on some of the most important issues of our time.

Promotion info

Geoffrey Robertson QC is a leading human rights lawyer and a UN war-crimes judge.He has been counsel in many notable Old Bailey trials, has defended hundreds of men facing death sentences in the Caribbean, and has won landmark rulings on civil liberty from the highest courts in Britain, Europe and the Commonwealth.He was involved in cases against General Pinochet and Hastings Banda, and in the training of judges who will try Saddam Hussein.His book Crimes against Humanity has been an inspiration for the global justice movement, and he is the author of an acclaimed memoir, The Justice Game, and the textbook Media Law.He is married to Kathy Lette: they live with their two children in London.Mr Robertson is Head of Doughty Street Chambers, a Master of the Middle Temple, a Recorder and visiting professor at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Reviews

Praise from the United Kingdom for
"The Tyrannicide Brief
"
"Those terrible, blood-soaked years are vividly conjured up by Geoffrey Robertson. This is a fine book: well researched, well written, well indexed and well illustrated. The fact there is no bibliography is evidence that Robertson has broken new ground. Not only has he written the first biography of John Cooke, one of the pivotal figures of the mid-seventeenth century, but he has illuminated the legal process by which a powerful monarch was held to account by the law of the land."
"-Sunday Herald
"
"In telling his story, Geoffrey Robertson has redeemed from obscurity an unsung hero of true greatness, a selfless champion of the poor and a law reformer of rare distinction. More important, he has shed invigorating light on the course of the English Civil War."
"-The Spectator
"
"Geoffrey Robertson provides us with some fascinating insights into this significant case. What makes the book especially illuminating are the parallels with modern practice . . . [A] work of great compassion and, at a time when it seems to be fashionable for politicians to denigrate lawyers, an essential read for anyone who believes in the fearless independence of the law."
"-The Times
"
"[Robertson's] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not yet reached."
"-Literary Review
"
"A work of literary advocacy as elegant, impassioned and original as any the author can ever have laid before a court."
"-The Observer
"

Author description

Geoffrey Robertson QC is an Australian born radical lawyer. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and has lived in England ever since. He is Master of the Middle Temple and a Recorder (a part-time judge), and was recently appointed by the United Nations as an Appeal Judge for its war crimes court in Sierra Leone. He has written and presented TV programmes in Australia. His previous books include the acclaimed memoir The Justice Game (Vintage), and Crimes Against Humanity - The Struggle for Global Justice (Penguin). He is married to the author Kathy Lette.