The major part of this book is of course devoted to accounts of the cases themselves. He formally gave up his legal practice in 1984, at the age of nearly 70, but continued for many years to be deeply engaged in debates in the House of Lords, of which he had become a member in 1978 when he was created Lord Hutchinson of Lullington. At the end of the war he stood as the Labour candidate for a rock-solid Tory seat in Westminster, but rather to his relief was not elected – it was time to plunge into the law. Jeremy went to public school, to Oxford, and studied for the bar, though his full entry into the legal profession was delayed by the outbreak of war – he was to spend seven years in the Royal Navy, during which he also met and married the celebrated Shakespearean actress Peggy Ashcroft. Dressed in clothes made and hand-painted at the Omega Workshop, she would lead her two children through the back streets of Hammersmith, ignoring the shouts of the locals: ‘Here comes the Queen of Sheba!’ TS Eliot was a family friend, as was Aldous Huxley. Although not a conventional beauty, Mary Hutchinson was obviously a woman of huge charm and intelligence, who was Clive Bell’s mistress and supposedly Virginia Woolf’s inspiration for Mrs Dalloway.

His father, St John (Jack) Hutchinson, was himself a barrister, and his mother Mary was Lytton Strachey’s cousin. He was born in 1915, in an 18 th-century house overlooking the river in Hammersmith. So who was Jeremy Hutchinson, and where did his great liberal ideals originate from? Although not a biography, this books starts with a biographical sketch of Jeremy’s life. He also succeeded in stopping the suppression of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, and fought the notorious anti-permissiveness campaigner Mary Whitehouse when she prosecuted the director of the National Theatre production of Romans in Britain. His other celebrated defences included that of Great Train robber Charlie Wilson, art ‘faker’ Tom Keating, and Howard Marks, who was acquitted of charges relating to the largest importation of cannabis in British history. He defended Christine Keeler in the notorious Profumo affair in 1963, and co-defended Penguin Books when they were prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The cases he was involved in are some of the most famous of the twentieth century. So writes Jeremy Hutchinson, QC, in the afterword to this account of some of his most famous trials, published in the year he turns 100.

Court Number One by Thomas Grant