A PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN'S INN, edited by Angela Holdsworth
INNER TEMPLE - A COMMUNITY OF COMMUNITIES, edited by Val Horsler, John Baker

Third Millennium Publishing, £45



These are two coffee table treats that would make ideal gifts for those bewitched by the Bar and its somewhat mysterious institutions.



Both informative and handsomely illustrated glossy hardbacks affectionately attempt to capture the history, traditions and spirit of two of the Inns of Court, as well as portraying them as distinctive places of work at the heart of Legal London in the present day.

A Portrait of Lincoln's Inn, as the editor's note states, is not a comprehensive history, but rather an anthology of articles and memories creating a portrait of the inn, which has stood on the same site for six centuries. It explores the inn's connections beyond the law with literature, politics and religion, as well as looking at the lives of some of its great figures, including Lord Denning and Thomas More.



Another chapter is devoted to chronicling the inn's connections with 16 Prime Ministers, from Robert Walpole, who was a student there before abandoning the law, and William Pitt the Younger, to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.



Other notable alumni of the inn include William Penn, Quaker founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder and first Governor General of Pakistan.



One particularly interesting chapter chronicles the struggle for women to break into the closed society of the legal profession and the inn. It notes how Gwyneth Bebb, an Oxford graduate with a first in jurisprudence, was refused permission by the Law Society to sit the preliminary solicitors exams because a woman was not a 'person' within the meaning of the Solicitors Act 1843.



Inner Temple - A Community of Communities is published to mark the institution's 400th anniversary, and covers similar ground. It traces the legal and social history of the inn from the Knights Templar, who built the church in the 12th century, to the 21st century sightseers who visit to follow the trail laid out in Dan Browne's novel, The Da Vinci Code.



Two British prime ministers have been members of the inn - George Grenville in the 18th century, and Clement Attlee in the 20th. There have also been a number of highly distinguished foreign politicians, among them three of the men who shaped the independence of the Indian subcontinent - Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi.



Master Sedley, chairman of the Inn's library committee, writes that Gandhi was, in fact, disbarred by the inn in 1922 following his guilty plea to three counts of seditiously inciting dissatisfaction towards the imperial government, after which he was sentenced to six years imprisonment in Ahmedabad. Gandhi himself never sought readmission, but he was readmitted post mortem in 1988.



Catherine Baksi