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Book review: Leading Cases in Song

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28 March 2014 / Sally Thomas
Issue: 7600 / Categories: Features
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"Many of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny & the language stylish"

Author: Stephen Todd
Publisher: Brookers Ltd/Thomson Reuter
ISBN: 9780864728449
​Price: NZ$50

A whirlwind of ingenuity, wit and humour, Stephen Todd’s Leading Cases in Song is less a novelty book than a surreal journey into a parallel world teeming with a life of its own and peopled by a weird and wonderful cast of celebrities, eccentrics and other characters whose brushes with the law have become judicial landmarks.

Circus animals, bumble bees, sex and drugs—it’s all there, but this is opera, not rock and roll.

The material can be appreciated on several levels, for its legal knowledge, for the language, for the music or for sheer fun and is best enjoyed by the reader who can sing along with the music at full volume in the privacy of his or her own home (preferably not on your train to work).

Surprisingly perhaps, you don’t have to be a Gilbert and Sullivan buff, a lawyer or even musical to appreciate the rhythm, comedy and sheer know-how bursting

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