As standard works get bigger, gaps in the ecosystem emerge which can be filled by a new, smaller competitor. The competitor will do more efficiently those things which the larger works did, changing and adapting to new conditions. The world of books reveals parallels with that of the dinosaurs. The point is made by recent arrivals in the conflict of laws. Time there no doubt was whan a reader could peruse Dicey' or Cheshire2 and gather the essence of the subject. Today, though, even Stakhanov would be hard put to it to do it: the combined length of these mighty tomes is 2,500 pages, and their weight nine pounds. A fresh start was clearly called for; Mr Collier3 and Mr Jaffey4 have each sought to make it, producing surveys of the subject in a little under 400 pages of AS paper. What will the purchaser get for his money? The answer is short, clear, traditional summaries of the law. The shortness has already been noted. The clarity is most praiseworthy: conflicts is a subject of increasing importance, and a user-friendly account of its principles is a welcome addition to the literature. Even so, clarity can be overdone, and on occasions Collier insists that, if only people stopped trying to be clever, conflicts would be a great deal simpler than it is. Collier is not a man evidently troubled by doubts or uncertainty. The law has become 'rather confused ... quite unnecessarily' because 'some judges seem almost perversely to take delight in muddying the waters'. Those who have sought to unmuddy the waters get short shrift as well: 'it is unnecessary to subject the speeches of their Lordships to close analysis to discover the ratio decidendi; since in subsequent cases the Court of Appeal has said what it is',5 and 'it might well be thought that its difficulties and obscurities increase in direct proportion to the increase in the quantity of juristic discussion of it'.6 One cannot help but ponder the thinness of the line (to say nothing of its location) between robustness and anti-intellectualism. The book may well have grown out of