Family law is of fairly recent invention, especially as an academic subject, credit for this achievement usually going to Professor Peter Bromley, who published the first edition of his now well known textbook in 1957. In the same decade, a practical text on ‘Divorce’, as the general subject of family law was then called, was published by Dmitri Tolstoy. Tolstoy was an ex-patriate Russian aristocrat practising at the common law end of the English Bar, and the father of the then equally unknown historian Nikolai Tolstoy, later famously sued by Lord Aldington for defamation in relation to the West’s alleged post-Second World War betrayal of the Cossacks
