treaties reflect at least some measure of agreement some of the time, a point Allott himself does not deny. The task of the interpreter is to reflect that agreement in the case envisaged, but often it goes further: to resolve what may not have been agreed in a manner as far as possible consistent with the text and any underlying intent. For it may well not be the case that the disagreement which faces the interpreter was one the drafters envisaged. In such a case there is an irreducible element of originality in the act of interpretation. Always, the interpreter is taking a form of words and applying it to a given situation; sometimes she is doing so alone. For reasons such as this, interpretation has been a perennial topic in international legal theory and practice. This collection of essays teeters intriguingly between interpretation in the way international lawyers normally think about it and interpretation as everything they think about. Legal scholarship has tended to tackle the issue of interpretation either from an abstract, quasi-philosophical perspective, or by focusing on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and its application. The attempt is made here to bring these divergent approaches into some better relationship with each other, while examining the VCLT rules and processes of interpretation in international law more generally. In their introductory chapter, Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor (both advanced doctoral students at Cambridge) helpfully remind us that interpretation in international law is not an island, despite contemporary appeals to disciplinary autonomy. The book is centred on the metaphor of the game. There are players, rules, and strategies, deployed with the object of victory. Bellicose the metaphor may sound, but it cannot be denied that, at least in the heat of battle, international lawyers think that their interpretations are right, and they play the game by trying to convince others of this. Moreover, the metaphor provides a more-or-less illuminating framework in which to situate the practice and process of interpretation. It helps reveal the contingency of current interpretive practices, and demonstrates a refusal to reify the status quo for its own sake. But I do not take the contributors to this volume to resile from the proposition that interpretation in international law is a game that works most of the time and is worth playing. After all, if there is nothing in interpretation beyond the preferences of the interpreter, then apparent agreement is simply a postponement of disagreement, at best a delegation to unascertained others.