Books by John Cooke

It's the late 1960s - a decade of Mods and Rockers; Beats and Hippies and full of peace and love. Aged seventeen, John Cooke ventures out on the roads, hitch-hiking around the UK. On the South Coast, he gets caught up with the romance of the sea and foregoes his freedom when he signs away more than nine years of his life by joining the Royal Navy.

Sublime Lunacy is a collection of random anecdotes and recollections resurrected in old age from a musty attic of memories-often in response to gentle prompting from Bacchus. From a childhood encounter with a U-Boat in mid-Atlantic to incarceration in a Macedonian jail; from the joys of foot safaris in Africa to the delight of hearing pure Elizabethan English in the high pastures of the Zagros Mountains; from the rigours of an English Public School education to the dangerous freedoms of undergraduate life at Oxford; from rock climbing on crags and colleges to dining with Japanese royalty. Sublime Lunacy combines travel and exploration with stories of natural history and scientific research. It is presented for public scrutiny in the hope that readers might find something to interest or amuse among this residue of a life well spent.

The essays in this volume are, at first sight, a curiously varied assortment. Written solely for personal pleasure, without intention or expectation of publication, many have long lain forgotten, gathering digital dust over many years. Except for those covering aspects of Balinese culture and history, they possess no unifying theme to justify inclusion. They range from the semi-academic to the frivolous, from the serious to the trivial. One essay explores an unexpected connection between narcissism and travel, another considers possibilities of life in the hereafter. Art and Disability is discussed next to atomic weapons, high crimes and nuclear misdemeanors. A comic village dispute in the depths of rural France is juxtaposed against the dramatic discovery of a new-found family uncovered by untangling threads of DNA. It is manifestly a strange collection, offered without excuse or apology in the hope that readers may perhaps find something to interest or amuse.

Safe Keeping is an intimate account of a small English boy's survival of a mid-Atlantic U-boat attack while on a wartime voyage to sanctuary, and his subsequent joyful childhood exile in America, which paved the way to a rich and rewarding adult life. It is a vivid account of wartime anxieties on both sides of the Atlantic, exploring among much else, death and sacrifice, rationing and food shortages, child-rearing and education.The story is told through the correspondence between the boy's mother in England and his Connecticut foster-mother - greatly enhanced by the boy's own vivid verbatim descriptions of his full and varied life.

Law of Tort, part of the Foundations series, offers a comprehensive, clear and straightforward account of the law ideal for LLB and GDL students.