About the Author:
John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist, and former practicing barrister who has written many film scripts as well as stage, radio, and television plays, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He is the author of twelve collections of Rumpole stories and three acclaimed volumes of autobiography.
From Booklist:
The author of the popular Rumpole stories as well as the lacerating political novel Paradise Postponed (1986) opens this tenderhearted sequel to his first autobiography (Clinging to the Wreckage [1987]) with anecdotes from his career as a queen's counsel, when he found himself establishing short-term but intense friendships with hard-core criminals during the course of their trials. His schizoid existence as a writer with a day job as a lawyer leads to a delightful juxtaposition of people and events, so that a description of a sordid murder trial is followed by a story about a raucous party thrown by director Tony Richardson. Pressured to practice law by his father--an avid gardener whose "ghost . . . is a hard one to banish, I still see him feeling for the flowers in his blindness . . . dressed in an ancient tweed suit"--Mortimer eventually quit the law to devote himself to writing. He talks of visiting Moscow with the Royal Shakespeare Company and swapping oft-heard jokes with a dying David Niven. In a self-deprecating, dryly amusing, unforgettable voice, Mortimer offers up the second part of his life story in a style so fluid, it seems effortless. Joanne Wilkinson
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