‘They who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.”

I read these words, from Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux, on a train to London. They concern the imminent trial of hero Phineas Finn, a Government minister, on a murder charge. Moments before, I had pushed aside that day’s Times, wherein it was reported that Shrien Dewani’s trial for the alleged murder of his wife was expected to last at least two months.

As so often with Trollope, though he was writing here in the 1870s, one has the sense of entering a world not really so very different from that of today.

Before Dewani’s came the almost endless trial, also in South Africa, of Oscar Pistorius. Before these were marathon hearings involving O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson and Phil Spector. In the 1970s, Britain saw the 68-day trial of politician John Stonehouse on charges of fraud and forgery.

Trollope returns to the subject as Finn’s trial gets under way.

“The length of [a] trial is proportioned . . . to the importance, or rather to the public interest, of the case — so that the trial which has been suggested of a disappointed ex-Prime Minister would certainly take at least a fortnight, even though the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor had seen the blow struck, whereas a collier may knock his wife’s brains out in the in the dark and be sent to the gallows with a trial that shall not last three hours.

“And yet the collier has to be hung — if found guilty — and no one thinks that his life is improperly endangered by reckless haste. Whether lives may not be improperly saved by the more lengthened process is another question.”