Jeremy Hutchinson was the doyen of the criminal bar in the 1960s and 1970s. No Old Bailey hack or parvenu Rumpole, he was the son of Jack, a distinguished practitioner in the same field, and Mary, a Bloomsbury Strachey. An Oxford undergraduate who acquired a criminal record along with a PPE degree (he accidentally shot a policeman with an air pistol), married first to Peggy Ashcroft, he moved throughout his life in the upper echelons of English liberal intellectual society, and was elevated, while still in practice, to the House of Lords. The brief biographical sketch at the outset of this book, littered with names of those whose paths he crossed, including T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Isaiah Berlin and Roy Jenkins, sparks regret that Jeremy — as he has always insisted on being called — was too modest to write a memoir himself.
Happily Thomas Grant, also a barrister, found himself by chance the Sussex neighbour of the eminent advocate, now more than quarter of a century into his retirement, and spotted a reputation which deserved resurrection.
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