Book

• In The Trial of Vladimir Putin, barrister Geoffrey Robertson answers that question by dramatising what might happen within the walls of a future courtroom.
• The question of whether Putin is guilty of aggression is fairly straightforward.
• Evidence would be needed that he is responsible in his role as a commander for actions carried out by subordinates.
• Instead, a special aggression tribunal would have to be established in the tradition of the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg.

• It is not pure fiction; it is speculation informed by Robertson’s experience.
• The details he imagines will bring these potential future trials to life for readers who are less familiar than he is with the inside of a courtroom.
• Does Robertson really need to tell us three times that any judgements should be uploaded to the internet?

Rhetorical devices

• Whether Putin should be tried even if absent is a hard question because there are arguments on both sides.
• Instead, he uses rhetorical tools such as hyperbole: if “international law is to have any meaning”, he writes, then a trial in the defendant’s absence “must be acceptable”.
• Robertson criticises this with the remark that it “entitles a man who has given orders to kill thousands to stand back and laugh”.

• It is that he gives the impression that the complexities do not exist.
• Dismissive language is a more general feature of his writing style.
• The implication is that Robertson is atypical among lawyers, someone who will sweep aside conventions and assumptions.
• Read more:
  An inside look at the dangerous, painstaking work of collecting evidence of suspected war crimes in Ukraine

The United Nations

• One of the bolder elements in the book is what Robertson says about the United Nations.
• One of them is that the Security Council could authorise, say, the United States to take military action against another nuclear-armed major power: is that outcome “obviously right”?
• The same logic might be used to justify expelling the United States, Britain and Australia, which were accused of unlawfully invading Iraq in 2003.
• Robertson compares the UN unfavourably with its predecessor, the League of Nations, which “expelled the USSR for attacking Finland”.

Rowan Nicholson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The decision sent out shockwaves: for the first time, a musician had received the most prestigious literary award on the planet.
• Does it mean the same as it did in 1901, when the first Nobel prize for literature was awarded?

High and low culture

• Is there a justification for distinguishing high and low culture?
• What is the relationship between culture and power?
• Often, the word “literary” is a status symbol, a seal of approval to distinguish “high” culture from more vulgar or less valuable “low” forms of culture.

Word play: text-based video games

• According to data from video game data consultancy Newzoo, more than 3 billion people play video games worldwide – almost half of the world’s population.
• When the first video games were developed in the 1950s, two distinct genres emerged: one was action oriented (such as the pioneering 1958 game Tennis for Two), and the other more text based.

• The inclusion of images in adventure games would not arrive until 1980, when Mystery House became the first “graphic adventure” game.
• Despite technological advances, these games inherited several features from interactive fiction, including the predominant role of text.

Literature on the screen: “story-rich” games

• In more recent years, a new sub-genre of adventure games – known as “story-rich” games – has become popular thanks to independent creators and producers.
• In Papers, Please (2013), a border policeman in a fictional dictatorial regime deals with terrible moral dilemmas on a daily basis.

• They have to explore several corridors while trying unsuccessfully to interact with their surroundings, accompanied by the voice of an enigmatic narrator.
• Upon reaching a room with two open doors, the voiceover states that Stanley “entered the door on his left”.
• Each decision then opens up new paths leading to dozens of possible endings, similar to a “choose your own adventure” book.

• These works are fundamentally based on language, begging the question of why video games cannot also fit into this category.
• Writing has always tried to break away from established ideas, and we know that literature is not limited to words on paper.

Andrés Porras Chaves no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

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