If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
J M Rennie, N R C Roberton. London: Edward Arnold, 2001, £19.99, pp 565. ISBN 0340720107
As an SHO, I bought the first edition of the Manual in 1982. It was a survival guide which provided safe certainties in the small hours of the night. It was small, light, and compact. There was no competition: the Roberton Manual was the book to have!
Nearly 20 years on, where has the 4th edition taken us? Bigger, certainly: a behemoth of a “small” manual with 550 pages. Not much taller or wider than its predecessors, but much thicker, the rather thin and closely typeset pages distinctly reminiscent of a Bible. Thirty four chapters and eight appendices. There’s an awful lot of information in here.
Road testing a book like this is quite a challenge. Clearly one should not ask …