John Mortimer

Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular. More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By introducing imprisonment without trial and attacking the golden threads of British justice such as the presumption of innocence which means that the burden of proof should always be on the prosecution, the present Labour government, through its disastrous home secretaries, has demeaned our judicial system. It is hoped that they will pay the penalty for this at the forthcoming election.

Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career, he followed the one-time lawyer’s rule, ‘Failed in London, Try Hong Kong’. Unlike the many barristers who have made fortunes in Hong Kong, he became a judge and then retired to Dorset with his wife Betty, where much of this beautifully written and strangely moving novel takes place.

A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members of the British upper class shallow and boring. The date was 1930 when the 27-year-old Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies. Sixteen years later Kingsley Amis read Brideshead Revisited at St John's College, Oxford and sent quotations to Philip Larkin with a 'burp' printed after what he thought was every precious line. Although it has to be said that a burp after 'made free of her narrow loins' is justified, the incident shows how important it is, if you are struggling to find a new literary voice, to burp at the immediate past.