Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Mortimer's Miscellany

Sir John Mortimer, author of the charming Rumpole of the Bailey series as well as other books, is wowing them with a one-man show in London. An excerpt from Charles Spencer’s review in The Telegraph:

A pianist plays popular classics and La Vie en rose and Mortimer regales us with his apparently fathomless, if not always entirely unfamiliar, stock of anecdotes, many of them involving the legal life. I particularly loved the story of the judge, due to deliver his summing up, who assembled counsel to explain that he had inadvertently left his speech at home. "Fax it up, my lord," suggested one QC helpfully. "Yes it does, rather," replied the absent-minded judge.


There are fond memories, too, of Mortimer's father, the blind divorce lawyer who has inspired so much of his son's work and life, not least in that funny and poignant memory play A Voyage Round My Father, superbly revived last year.

Mortimer père was a man who once proved adultery in a divorce case with reference to a pair of footprints, upside down, on the dashboard of an Austin 7. No son could be prouder of his dad when Mortimer describes the incident.

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