JEREMY HUTCHINSON’S CASE HISTORIES
By Thomas Grant (John Murray £9.99) AT FIRST glance, you might wonder how interesting a book about a lawyer can be. But once you open the pages of this one, you’ll be instantly hooked.
Jeremy Hutchinson is a barrister who appeared in some of the greatest criminal cases of Fifties through to the Eighties. Now aged 100, this is an account of his work — except written by another QC, because Hutchinson was ‘too busy living in the present to rake over the past’.
Personal details abound, such as his nickname for family friend T. S. Eliot, ‘The Eagle’ (as a tribute to his distinct nose) and Aldous Huxley, the ‘quangle-wangle’.
But it’s in the courtroom where Jeremy’s at his best.
He defended Christine Keeler, George Blake and Kempton Bunton — the only person in the history of the National Gallery to have ‘stolen’ a painting and got away with it.
In t ypically bril l i ant Hutchinson fashion, he persuaded the jury that his client, who had sneaked Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington out of a toilet window, was not guilty of stealing because he had ‘no intention to keep it permanently’. Totally terrific. from his children and is penniless. He’s then forced to leave London.
The man is Geoffrey Chaucer and, though he’s already written more than half of his poetic legacy, he’s not yet a celebrated writer.
Chaucer moves to Kent and, despite his initial sense of alienation, he finds the crucial impetus to write The Canterbury Tales.
His time spent in the noisy and stinking streets of London, where ‘racy incidents were part of the fodder of daily life’, gives Chaucer plenty of inspiration for his work, and these scenes are retold with vivid colour in this riveting romp of a biography.