John Mortimer (1923-2009) was an English novelist, playwright, and sometimes barrister. He is known best for his Rumpole novels and short stories, which were televised as the Rumpole of the Bailey series, and for his adaptation of Brideshead Revisited for the ITV. He defended Virgin Records in a 1977 obscenity hearing for the first naughty word in the title Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and once called the law the “great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages – as if it were a small mechanical toy which might occupy half an hour on a rainy afternoon.” He had two wives (sequentially), both named Penelope, and he was knighted in 1998. In 1991 he published The Rapstone Chronicles, collecting Paradise Postponed (1985) and Titmuss Regained (1990), to which The Sound of Trumpets (1998) would be added.
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