That is the title of this 2004 book by Christopher Booker (1937–2019), a British journalist who wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph. (FYI: Here is his Wikipedia page.) I am generally highly skeptical of all such reductionist taxonomies, but this one nevertheless intrigues me because of my background in law, for over the years I have heard countless times how the practice of law is similar to story-telling. (By way of example, check out this series of 34 books, all of which are published by West Academic, called “Law Stories“.) If this comparison between the practice of law and story-telling is true, if law is ultimately about telling stories, then what type of stories do lawyers and judges and law professors like to tell? I will further explore this question in light of Booker’s seven-fold taxonomy of plots in my next few posts …