Download or read book John Mortimer written by Graham Lord and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Britain every generation produces a national treasure, a lovable figure so English that he could not possibly be of any other nationality, and Sir John Mortimer is just such a figure.Mortimer has delighted millions all over the world with seven television series about the gloriously larger-than-life fictional barrister Horace Rumpole --- Rumpole of the Bailey --- as well as novels, autobiographies, stage plays, film scripts, short stories, television and radio plays, newspaper articles, and even an opera and a ballet. Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness appeared in his plays, and among his greatest theatrical triumphs is his stage and television play A Voyage Round My Father. He won a British Book Awards trophy for Lifetime Achievement in 2005.Mortimer actually practiced as a barrister for thirty-six years, defending husbands, wives, pornographers, and murderers in court and starring as the real-life "Devil's Advocate" in several legendary obscenity and blasphemy cases in the 1970s, quickly becoming a liberal hero.Yet despite huge success, fame, and knighthood there lurks beneath that genial "champagne socialist" mask an unusually complex man who has been plagued by depression, doubt, insecurity, and an irresistible urge to commit adultery.Biographer Graham Lord, whose discovery that Mortimer had a secret son by the British actress Wendy Craig forced Sir John to admit it publicly in 2004, has interviewed scores of Mortmer's family, friends, mistresses, and enemies to write a frank and vital biography that reveals the startling reality behind the beloved public figure. "Breathless prose and many juicyrevelations-an absorbing read."--Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Rumpole of the Bailey written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal' P. D. James Horace Rumpole - dishevelled barrister at law, drinker of claret and smoker of cigars, inveterate quoter of Wordsworth and eternal defender of the underdog - is one of the greatest English comic characters ever created. This is the original volume of Rumpole stories, introducing us to the legal triumphs that first made the Old Bailey Hack's name, along with a host of choice villains, frequent forays to Pommeroy's wine bar and, of course, his formidable, magisterial wife Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed. 'I thank heaven for small mercies. The first of these is Rumpole' Clive James 'A fruity, foxy masterpiece, defender of our wilting faith in mankind' Sunday Times
Download or read book A Voyage Round John Mortimer written by Valerie Grove and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist, playwright, and barrister Sir John Mortimer has led an extraordinarily rich and daring life, privately and professionally, much of it in the public eye. His own writings, including the wildly popular books in the Rumpole of the Bailey series, his three acclaimed volumes of autobiography, and his screenplay for Brideshead Revisited, have rewarded readers and viewers with insight and humor. Now, biographer Valerie Grove has been given full access to Mortimer, tracing his legal and literary career, from his first attempts at writing novels and plays, through his great triumphs in court, to the creation of the popular character Horace Rumpole. Mortimer's personal life--including his marriages and his many affairs--is as colorful as any fiction he's written. Correcting the many errors and half-truths found in a previous biography, Grove's book is essential reading for Mortimer's fans.--From publisher description.
Download or read book A Voyage Round My Father written by John Mortimer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2002-02-13 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Mortimer's autobiographical play is the affectionate portrait of a son's relationship with his father. Growing up in the shadow of the brilliant barrister, who adored his garden and hated visitors, and whose blindness was never mentioned, the son continually yearns for his father's love and respect. A Voyage Round My Father opened in June 2006 at the Donmar Theatre, London starring Derek Jacobi.
Download or read book Summer s Lease written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1991-05-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The villa near a small Tuscan town is everything the Pargeter family could want for three weeks. But when the idyll turns sour, Molly Pargeter begins to wonder about their mysterious absentee landlord.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Villains written by John Mortimer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers selections from literature and history depicting both real and fictitious criminals, murderers, confidence men, hypocrites, traitors, spies, and tyrants
Download or read book Paradise Postponed written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book John Mortimer Plays One written by John Mortimer and published by Oberon Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes: A Voyage Around My Father, one of Mortimer's greatest theatrical successes and a celebration of the Shakespeare-quoting, eccentric, brave, and impossible barrister the author had as a father. Also includes: The Collaborators, The Dock Brief, Lunch Hour, and What Shall We Tell Caroline?
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Rumpole written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horace Rumpole - witty, eloquent, dishevelled and cynical - is one of fiction's best-loved barristers-at-law. In these twenty classic tales, Rumpole battles through the Old Bailey, whether defending various members of an incompetent South London crime family, taking on haute-cuisine chefs and showfolk or mocking the pomposity of his own profession, all the while being held in check by his wife, Hilda: the wonderful, fearsome She Who Must Be Obeyed. These collected stories, in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time, are a definitive introduction to one of the wisest and wittiest characters in British comic writing and a reminder of what justice should really be about. With a new introduction by Sam Leith, former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and contributor to the Evening Standard, Guardian and Spectator.
Download or read book Lunch Hour written by John Mortimer and published by London : Methuen. This book was released on 1960 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hock and Soda Water written by John Mortimer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry, now in the autumn of his years, is transported back to the key episodes of his life. At once ironic and affectionate, he speaks with his younger self both man and boy, offering warnings of a life to come and advice on how he might live it without the small self-delusions and regrets that leave him ultimately unfulfilled. Warm, funny and entertaining Hock and Soda Water is a nostalgic lament for a life never lived.
Download or read book Forever Rumpole written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-11-10 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Mortimer—novelist, playwright, memoirist, and the author of more than eighty Rumpole short stories—will never be forgotten. While still a practicing barrister, Mortimer took up the pen, and the rest is literary history. His stories featuring the cigar-chomping, cheap-wine-tippling Rumpole and his wife, Hilda (aka "She Who Must Be Obeyed"), have justly earned their place in the pantheon of mystery fiction legends, becoming the basis for the very successful television series Rumpole of the Bailey. Bringing fourteen of Rumpole's most entertaining adventures (seven of which were collected in The Best of Rumpole) together with a fragment of a new story, Forever Rumpole proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Rumpole is never less than delightful.
Download or read book Where There s a Will written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE written by John Mortimer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book John Mortimer Plays One written by John Mortimer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2001-09-18 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the playsA Voyage Around My Father, The Collaborators, The Dock Brief, Lunch Hour, and What Shall We Tell Caroline? An unsuccessful barrister and even more unsuccessful murderer are the subject of Mortimer’s first play, The Dock Brief. This was followed by What Shall We Tell Caroline? and then Lunch Hour, another short play, about love and lies in the lunch-hour. The Collaborators covers the wear and tear of married life subsequently united by the threat of a third party. A Voyage Round My Father, one of Mortimer’s greatest theatrical successes, is a celebration of the Shakespeare-quoting, eccentric, brave and impossible barrister the author had as a father.
Download or read book Kid Gloves written by Adam Mars-Jones and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW STATESMAN, TELEGRAPH, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 When his widowed father - once a high court judge and always a formidable figure - drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. In the aftermath of an unlooked-for intimacy, Mars-Jones has written a book devoted to particular emotions and events. Kid Gloves is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself - and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation, taking the homophobic bull by the horns. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O'Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.
Download or read book Funny Bunny s Magic Show written by David Wood and published by Doubleday Uk. This book was released on 2000 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pop-through-the-slot book with a magical theme, this has lots of play value for toddlers. The full colour illustrations are by Richard Fowler. Children are able to do magic tricks and can lift-the-flaps to play Find the Bunny, watch him change colour and see him escape from a locked chest.
