Pupil Barrister
Things that happen to me, or things I do
I am enjoying Austin Kleon’s obsession with zines and decided to make one for myself.
I chose to summarise Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] UKHL 100, a landmark case in the development of the tort of negligence, and also for manufacturers liability for defective products.
Continue readingI’m incredibly busy with a couple of major things at the moment made more difficult by the lockdown.
(No, not A Thousand And One Recaps — that’s ticking along just fine).
As a result of my distractions, have not had time to post about the appalling UK coronavirus death rate, the preposterous lockdown sabotage by Dominic Cummings, the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, or the atrocious glorification of violence by Donald Trump that has finally caused Twitter to place warnings next to his Tweets.
My silence on all these issues is not to be taken as due to a lack of opinion, or sufficient emotion about each of them. I just don’t have time.
Continue readingIt is often said that constraints can fuel creativity. Well, the COVID-19 lockdown is a pretty big constraint.
Amid the sadness and death, it has been interesting to see the new art and culture that is already emerging. Creativity working up against the boundaries we have set for ourselves. Artists looking afresh at the technology we are using to communicate, and wondering what new modes of design and storytelling they might enable.
The most obvious example of this is video conferencing software. The grids of images that apps like Zoom use to display the other people in the chat have become part of our visual culture. I really enjoyed the Maltesers ‘Isolation Life’ series of adverts, and I love the video for ‘Phenom’ by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down (intriguing song, too).
Continue readingIn 2004, the writer Orhan Pamuk gave the inaugural Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture, at the Prague Writer’s Festival. Among his remarks, he said this:
I have personally known writers who have chosen to raise forbidden topics purely because they were forbidden. I think I am no different. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. This, indeed, is the spirit that informs the solidarity felt by PEN, by writers all over the world.
Orhan Pamuk
I would often use the highlighted bit of that quote in English PEN’s marketing communications. I thought it would appeal to the worldliness of other writers, their solidarity and empathy with fellow wordsmiths.
But occasionally I would worry that the proper meaning of that quote was properly understood. Because taken literally, it’s obviously untrue. The fact that Ahmet Altan (to pick another Turkish novelist) is currently in prison and censored does not stop me writing my derivative science fiction or my bad poetry. Continue reading
I have not posted much here this month, because I’ve been posting a lot over at A Thousand And One Recaps, my close reading of The Arabian Nights.
Here are links to the recaps posted so far.
Continue reading© 2026 Robert Sharp
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