Harry Mount
Court Lore
Defending the Guilty: Truth and Lies in the Criminal Courtroom
By Alex McBride
Viking xxpp £12.99 order from our bookshop
In my brief time as a libel barrister, I often thought I should have been a criminal lawyer instead. It was more romantic and exciting, with more time in court (or on your feet, as barristers put it). That was until a criminal barrister friend of mine was severely beaten up in the holding cell beneath a London court by his client, a violent drug addict on a GBH charge.
The late Sir John Mortimer, Horace Rumpole and a hundred TV dramas have given the criminal lawyer's grubby life a sheen of glamour it doesn't really deserve. It doesn't help, either, that Fleet Street cuts a line between the two halves of the Inns of Court – with
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity
'The leopard skins that she wore like a big-game hunter, the swaggering strut ... every detail semaphored power and valiantly atoned for inadequacy.'
Peter Conrad weighs up Laura Fairrie's documentary about Jackie Collins and her 'shag-happy fiction'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Batlava Lake' is 'a sophisticated performance in which it can be difficult to determine where Mars-Jones himself is,' says Anthony Cummins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/youre-in-the-army-now