In John Mortimer's most famous and highly autobiographical play, a young man looks back on an unconventional childhood and youth overshadowed by his irascible and eccentric father. Sent away to boarding school to be 'prepared for life', he finds teachers deranged by shell shock after the First World War and boys who try to coat their ordinary home lives with romance. As the Second World War begins, the mild-mannered protagonist tries to become a writer, but is compelled to become a barrister like his father -- a towering character depicted with affection and exasperation.Hugely popular since it was first performed, A Voyage Round My Father is a sublimely comic drama of warmth, nostalgia and wisdom.

Rumpole at Christmas - the hilarious festive stories of John Mortimer's greatest character 'Without Rumpole, the world would be a poorer place' Daily Mail Horace Rumpole is not overfond of the rituals of Christmas: turkey, tinsel and the like. But happily the festive season is not one respected by the criminal fraternity; meaning that celebrations in the Rumpole household are frequently disturbed in most-welcome ways. There's the suspicious Father Christmas at Equity's Court's festive party. The actor who goes missing from the panto on the night of a major crime. As well as the body cluttering up the health farm (where the great barrister is gloomily restricted to a diet of yak's milk and steamed spinach to please She Who Must Be Obeyed). These seven wonderful Rumpole stories show the great man at his sharpest, wittiest and best. Readers of Sherlock Holmes, P.D. James and P.G. Wodehouse will love...

Following the bestselling SUMMER OF A DORMOUSE, Sir John Mortimer - playwright, novelist, octogenarian and erstwhile QC - offers up more wickedly funny lessons in living and growing old disgracefully. What would we like to leave to our descendants? Not a third-rate painting or our PEPS, according to Sir John, but a love of Shakespeare, a taste for alcohol, the ability to defeat boredom, the importance of never locking the lavatory door, and so on. Owing something to Montaigne's essays, something to Wilde's aphorisms and something to Yeats' poem for his daughter, Where There's a Will offers plenty of sparkling and surprising advice from one who has seen it all.

Clinging to the Wreckage is the first part of John Mortimer's acclaimed autobiography. Here he recounts his solitary childhood in the English countryside, with affectionate portraits of his remote parents -- an increasingly unconventional barrister father, whose blindness must never be mentioned, battling earwigs in the mutinous garden, and a vague and endlessly patient mother. As a boy dreaming of a tap-dancing career on the stage and forming a one-boy communist cell at boarding school, his father pushes him to pursue the law, where Mortimer embarks on the career that was to inspire his hilarious and immortal literary creations.Told with great humour and touching honesty, this is a magnificent achievement by one of Britain's best-loved writers.

The creator of Rumpole of the Bailey returns to the novel with a comic tale of middle-class do-gooding gone awry Thousands of readers have discovered the inimitable voice of John Mortimer through his Rumpole series of stories. But with Quite Honestly, Mortimer creates a cast of characters that rivals his usual Rumpole repertoire, delivering a wonderfully comic novel, packed with entertaining reflections on a life in crime. Life couldn’t be better for Lucinda Purefoy. She’s got a steady boyfriend, a degree in social sciences from Manchester University, and the offer of a high-powered job in advertising. With all this good fortune, isn’t it appropriate for her to give something back to society? With her newly minted membership in Social Carers, Reformers, and Praeceptors (SCRAP for short), an organization that recruits women to become the guides, philosophers, and friends to ex-convicts coming out of prison, Lucy finds herself standing outside the gates of Wormwood Scrubs waiting to greet a career burglar called Terry Keegan. What happens next—after a short and hostile trip to Burger King—confounds expectations and produces a signature Mortimer tale full of wit and surprise.

ASBOs may be the pride and joy of New Labour, but they don't cut much ice with Horace Rumpole - he takes the old-fashioned view that if anyone is going to be threatened with a restriction of their liberty then some form of legal proceeding ought to be gone through first. Not that Hilda agrees, of course, but she's too busy completing her memoirs to dissuade him from taking an interest when one of the Timson children is given an ASBO for playing football in the street. And pretty soon he realizes something fishy is going on. Why are the residents pursuing their vendetta against the Timson boy quite so strongly? Could they have a sinister reason for not wanting him on their street?John Mortimer's delightful new Rumpole novel sees the magician of the Old Bailey, and Pommeroy's Wine Bar, at his implacable best as he defends our ancient freedoms, even as he remains uneasy about what it is exactly Hilda is writing ...

Rumpole and the Angel of Death offers a comic commentary on cruelty to animals, human rights, and the fallibility of the justice system.In the title story of this collection Rumpole is defending a pro-euthanasia doctor on a charge of murdering his old colleague Chippy.

When Simeon Simcox, a socialist clergyman, leaves his entire fortune not to his family but to the ruthless, social-climbing Tory MP Leslie Titmuss, the Rector's two sons react in very different ways. Henry, novelist and former 'angry young man' turned grumpy old reactionary, decides to fight the will and prove their father was insane. Younger brother Fred, a mild-mannered country doctor, takes a different approach, quietly digging in Simeon's past, only to uncover an entirely unexpected explanation for the legacy.An exquisitely drawn saga of ancient rivalries and class struggles, featuring a glorious cast of characters, Paradise Postponed is a delicious portrait of English country life by a master satirist.

The Rumpole revival continues!With Rumpole Rests His Case, legions of fans welcomed back the curmudgeonly London barrister they had loved for years—and they are eager for more. The six new stories in Rumpole and the Primrose Path find Horace Rumpole—despite a heart attack that left him at death’s door in the previous volume—deftly parrying everything from the admonitions of his wife, Hilda, to the vagaries of his legal colleagues and their new director of marketing, Luci. With her cell phone, corporate jargon, glossy brochures, and plans to give their chambers a new image, Luci presumes Rumpole is soon to expire, and has been planning his memorial service. But the witty and irreverent Rumpole, sharp as ever, is far from hanging up his wig!

Outrageously outspoken and wildly unpredictable, Dick Dunster is the hero⎯or villain⎯in a drama of his own making. Philip Progmire is less heroic. He wants a quiet life with his wife Bethany and his job in the accounts department of the TV company Megapolis. But Dunster, his childhood friend and adversary, dogs his adult life, making him face cruel facts: his lack of acting talent, his wife's infidelity and the possible involvement of his boss in one of the secret war crimes of the last World War.

Throughout John Mortimer's career, he established profound friendships with people accused of various crimes. He also indulged his passion for writing, penning Paradise Postponed and a series of stories about Rumpole, for whom he was often mistaken. With wit, wisdom and tenderness he has written the story of his life.

Forever Rumpole - a hilarious new selection of the very best Rumpole stories by John Mortimer Horace Rumpole lives alongside Mr Pickwick and Bertie Wooster as one of the immortal comic characters in English fiction. With his curmudgeonly wit, his literary allusions, his disdain for personal ambition and his lack of pomposity, he has, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, 'ascended to the pantheon of literary immortals'. Forever Rumpole contains seven stories originally chosen by the author himself as his favourites, together with a further seven from the later period and the opening chapters of a Rumpole novel that Sir John was working on when he died in 2009. The book also includes a fascinating introduction by Ann Mallalieu, fellow lawyer and for many years Sir John's colleague in practice. 'Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal' P. D James, Mail on Sunday 'I thank heaven for small...