Geoffrey Robertson

Who Owns History?: Elgin’s loot and the case for returning plundered treasure by Geoffrey Robertson

March 2020, no. 419

After his success in forcing the British Natural History Museum to return skulls and bones of Tasmanian Aboriginals, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson was asked by the Greek minister of foreign affairs to ascertain whether international law could be used to induce the British to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Although the project found favour with a succession of Greek prime ministers, the Tsipras government decided not to act on Robertson’s recommendations. This book is a revised version of his report, along with a discussion of demands for the repatriation of other cultural treasures.

... (read more)

An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? by Geoffrey Robertson

by Neil Kaplan •

June-July 2015, no. 372

Neil Kaplan reviews 'An Inconvenient Genocide' by Geoffrey Robertson

April 2015 was the centenary of Gallipoli, an event deeply set in Australian history, but it was also the centenary of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the hands of the then Ottoman Empire. Yet the latter event is mired in controversy, and closure has not yet occurred. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century, but not the last.

Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK: The Case for Overturning his Conviction by Geoffrey Robertson

by Paul Morgan •

May 2014, no. 361

Paul Morgan reviews 'Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK: The Case for Overturning his Conviction' by Geoffrey Robertson

Who was Stephen Ward? And why does his fate matter today? The Profumo affair, with its mixture of sex, politics, aristocracy, and espionage, has become the archetypal scandal. In 1962, Jack Profumo was British Secretary of State for War (ministerial titles were more frank in those days) ...

... (read more)

Dreaming Too Loud: Reflections on a Race Apart by Geoffrey Robertson

by Frank Bongiorno •

February 2014, no. 358

Frank Bongiorno reviews 'Dreaming Too Loud: Reflections on a race apart' by Geoffrey Robertson

If the London Australian expatriate community has an aristocracy of sorts – as it clearly does – then Geoffrey Robertson QC and the novelist Kathy Lette, his wife since 1990, would be among its leading nobility. Robertson and Lette mix with royalty, both real and literary (‘our daughters had been flower girls at Salman’s wedding – I can’t remember which one’). I would love to have been present when Robertson advised Diana, during her affair with James Hewitt, that the Treason Act of 1361 laid down the death penalty for any party to adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne. Did she blush or blanch?

... (read more)