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BOOK REVIEW MEMOIRS OF A RADICAL LAWYER By Michael Mansfield Bloomsbury ISBN: 978 1 4088 0129 1 www.bloomsbury.com BEYOND THE NARROWLY LEGAL: RECOLLECTIONS OF A CONTROVERSIAL CAREER An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers ‘This is a memoir,’ states Michael Mansfield in his preface, ‘not an autobiography…. it is a collage of recollections and reminiscences.’ On reading this fascinating account of Michael Mansfield’s fascinating life, we are still a little puzzled as to why the book is not an autobiography. However you classify it, though, it’s worthy of note because of the name and fame of its author. Mansfield, it’s fair to say, is Britain’s best known defence lawyer, with a towering reputation as a doughty fighter, even for ostensibly lost causes. Presenting a challenge to conventional wisdom and the established view has been his forte. He seems to have had an attraction to controversial cases, all of them difficult, some of them virtually hopeless. Barristers refer to these as ‘hard cases’ and so they are. A shortlist of the cases he has pugnaciously fought includes Angela Cannings… Jill Dando and Barry George… Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana… Stephen Lawrence, and Jean Charles de Menezes. He has a rather robust, conversational style when he writes and soon, within the first few pages, you’re drawn into the quite eventful narrative of his wartime childhood in normally quiet middle class, suburban north London, with references to sirens, bombs, blackouts and rationing, not to mention being bereft of bananas and wondering if the next bomb you hear is going to hit you. You’d think that after all that, he’d have relished a quieter life, but no; it would appear that he rather thrived on conflict -- always the lot of a seeker after justice and truth -- and he certainly found it at the Bar. Interestingly, he reveals that it has been anger which has been the driving force of his career. It all started apparently, when a local police officer charged his mother with a parking offence, from which she strenuously defended herself in court, discovering to her dismay, that there are police officers out there who are not above lying. She was triumphantly acquitted, but warned the young Michael ever after: ‘never trust a man in uniform.’ The bulk of the book thereafter focuses on Mansfield’s cases, mostly the high profile ones that turned him into a high profile lawyer. ‘As a defence lawyer,’ he says (on the front cover so you can’t miss it) ‘it’s my job to defend the indefensible.’ Certainly his cases have generated some sensationally detailed headlines and body copy in the press and in among the personal reminiscences, his book is replete with commentary and insights. Take the Marchioness Riverboat disaster of 1989, for example, the aftermath of which was as murky as the waters of the Thames in which so many young people perished. His comments on the inquests and judicial public inquiries which usually follow such disasters are certainly thought provoking. ‘It is one thing to agree about the need to know,’ he remarks, ‘It is quite another to get answers from institutions, corporations and government departments.’ ‘Progress’, he adds is brought about ‘by the extraordinary efforts of ordinary groups of families, friends and individuals…who fight for what is right and who initiate change.’ He concludes that they occupy the moral high ground and their courageous stand benefiRead full review