Best books… Lady (Brenda) Hale

The judge and former president of the Supreme Court chooses her favourite books. Her memoir, Spider Woman, is out in paperback next month (Vintage £9.99). She appears at the Hay Festival on 4 and 5 June (hayfestival.com)

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, 1970 (Harper Perennial £10.99). The best feminist polemic ever, showing how women’s lives and bodies have been shaped by what men want, setting the second wave of feminism alight. But the struggle is not over. Men are still trying to control women’s bodies, and not just in Afghanistan.

Every Day is Mother’s Day by Hilary Mantel, 1985 (Fourth Estate £8.99). The novel that put our best female novelist on the map. A bizarre but funny story of a mother and her disabled daughter.

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, 1986 (Vintage £12.99). The story of the first fleet which set out to Australia to establish a penal colony. The founding of one nation but the undoing of another, told with scholarship, empathy and understanding.

The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham, 2010 (Penguin £9.99). The “rule of law” is bandied about without much understanding of what it means. Here, the greatest judge of the 21st century explains it in seven basic principles, easy to read, easy to understand, obviously right.

East West Street by Philippe Sands, 2016 (W&N £9.99). Sands is a leading international lawyer. In a gripping piece of detective work, he traces his Jewish family story back to Vienna, to Lviv (now in Ukraine), and to a street in the small town of Zolkiew, weaving it into the story of two other leading international lawyers, with extraordinary resonances in 2022.

Unlawful Killings by Wendy Joseph QC, 2022 (Doubleday £20). A retired judge relates six unlawful killings, each an imaginary composite of cases she has tried. After telling the story of the killing, and that of the trial, she offers penetrating comments on how the system copes or fails to cope with, for instance, teenage stabbings and wives who kill their abusive husbands.