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The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully
"The time will come in your life when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, 'From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks'". So writes the playwright, novelist and erstwhile QC, John Mortimer. And as a septuagenarian, he is writing from experience. But it's not the effort it takes to put on socks, or the need to use people as props to stop falling over, or the sad fact that one may be compelled to buy a "Decorative Window Film" to prevent against walking into glass doors that Mortimer objects to. "The real trouble with old age", he says, "is it lasts for such a short time". The Summer of a Dormouse is a wickedly funny journal in which Mortimer wryly observes the absurdities of old age. After all, "No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous". And Mortimer freely admits he often does. Such as the time he unintentionally pirouetted down some marble steps after getting out of a hotel bathtub and crashed into a set of shelves. "I fell amongst splintering glass and a hailstorm of cotton-wool buds, aware of a torrent of destruction". However, in spite of his partial immobility, failing eyesight and frequent tendency to topple over, Mortimer deals with his increasing decrepitude with formidable fortitude. Even a death threat fails to faze him: "Some one's offering to kill me--why on earth should they bother?" Sharp and dark, The Summer of a Dormouse is an upbeat account of a man not afraid to stare mortality in the face. --Christopher Kelly
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
6 people are currently reading
178 people want to read
About the author
John Mortimer
252 books233 followersJohn Clifford Mortimer was a novelist, playwright and former practising barrister. Among his many publications are several volumes of Rumpole stories and a trilogy of political novels, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets, featuring Leslie Titmuss - a character as brilliant as Rumpole. John Mortimer received a knighthood for his services to the arts in 1998.
Series:
Rumpole of the Bailey
Rapstone Chronicles
Series:
Rumpole of the Bailey
Rapstone Chronicles
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
May 13, 2017
FRom BBC Radio 4 EXtra:
Journalist, Henry Troutbeck Pottinger is now an old man.
He stands in the darkening garden of a vicarage by the sea and looks back on a life which seems to have passed as swiftly as Lord Byron's dormouse summer.
John Mortimer's drama stars Paul Scofield as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as an Old Man, Alex Jennings as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as a Man and Joe Roberts as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as a Boy.
With Oliver Ford Davies as the Rev. Henry Pottinger, Gemma Jones as Dawn Pottinger/Lady Fan, Joanna David as Felicity Rewcastle, Imelda Staunton as Mavis Whitney, John Rowe as Mr Rewcastle and David Allister as Editor/Barman.
With the Willie Brown Uni Band and accordionist Kevin Street.
Director: Marilyn Imrie
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsrs
Journalist, Henry Troutbeck Pottinger is now an old man.
He stands in the darkening garden of a vicarage by the sea and looks back on a life which seems to have passed as swiftly as Lord Byron's dormouse summer.
John Mortimer's drama stars Paul Scofield as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as an Old Man, Alex Jennings as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as a Man and Joe Roberts as Henry Troutbeck Pottinger as a Boy.
With Oliver Ford Davies as the Rev. Henry Pottinger, Gemma Jones as Dawn Pottinger/Lady Fan, Joanna David as Felicity Rewcastle, Imelda Staunton as Mavis Whitney, John Rowe as Mr Rewcastle and David Allister as Editor/Barman.
With the Willie Brown Uni Band and accordionist Kevin Street.
Director: Marilyn Imrie
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsrs
July 26, 2017
"Well aware that no one should grow old who isn't prepared to look ridiculous, John Mortimer, unrepentant septagenarian and creator of Horace Rumpole and Leslie Titmus, resigns himself to the fact that the putting on of socks should be left to the young. Yet despite his body's angry protestations, he is determined to continue enjoying the fruits of a long life supremely dedicated to pleasure. Here, he tells the poignant and wonderfully funny account of a year spent growing old disgracefully."
~~back cover
Although I've turned out to not be much of a fan of John Mortimer's writing, this book was lovely. Short chapters, written with wit and charm, and attractive nostalgia, interspersed with philosophical tidbits about aging made for lovely reading. The sort of memoirs we all wish we could write.
~~back cover
Although I've turned out to not be much of a fan of John Mortimer's writing, this book was lovely. Short chapters, written with wit and charm, and attractive nostalgia, interspersed with philosophical tidbits about aging made for lovely reading. The sort of memoirs we all wish we could write.
March 6, 2014
"No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous".
Read by the author, very rarely a wise decision.
There is a reason for a 2* rating being available to us and this book highlights that perfectly.
This was not terrible, there were some whimsical moments and a few smirkables however I would not recommend this on to anyone.
April 19, 2023
3.5 stars. A witty, charming, nostalgic memoir of the author’s seventy eighth year, interspersed with many amusing anecdotes. He writes about the interesting famous people he associates with, for example, Muriel Spark, the importance of juries, the changing legal practicalities of getting a divorce, growing up as a single child, being taught to memorize lines from Shakespeare and other famous works, writing plays, going on speaking tours, his daughter, and the issues with an aging body.
An entertaining, enjoyable reading experience.
This book was first published in 2000.
An entertaining, enjoyable reading experience.
This book was first published in 2000.
November 14, 2014
John Mortimer couldn't write a bad book, and there's a fair bit to enjoy in this. His love of celebrities and dubious anecdotes do pall a bit in it, though, and some of it reads like filler for a series of articles rather than a coherent book. Colette did old age better; many have done it worse. I want to praise it with faint damns.
September 23, 2024
"The time will come in your life, it will almost certainly come, when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, 'From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks.'"
So begins one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors. You may know John Mortimer better as the author of the "Rumpole" books: Rumpole of the Bailey, The Trials of Rumpole, Rumpole for the Defence, and so on. I have never read the Rumpole books, and I never got around to watching the BBC TV series Rumpole of the Bailey which ran for seven seasons, from April 1978 to December 1992.
My first introduction to the author were the Rapstone novels, written during the Thatcher era, and featuring the wonderfully execrable right-wing prig, Leslie Titmuss. Those three novels, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained, and The Sound of Trumpets, don't appear in my bookshelf at the moment - lost, I think, in one of my frequent moves. I'm making a note as we speak to replace them and read them again.
Mortimer was an enormously prolific writer. Besides the Rumpole novels - 20 of them, as well as the TV series - and the Rapstone books, he wrote nine other novels, 44 plays, and several volumes of autobiography; The Summer of a Dormouse is one of those and, like everything he wrote, it is delightful.
I'm actually a little surprised to find it here, in my apartment, as I like it so much I keep buying copies and giving them to friends for their birthdays. It's that kind of book. Although you wouldn't give it to someone younger than 50, I don't think. As it says on the book jacket, Mortimer describes what it's like to be 77 and still feel like you're 11. I'm not 77 - yet - but I can relate. I can still put on my own socks and walk without assistance but I've been known to swear at the writing on a bottle of pills and wonder why everybody mumbles.
The title is taken from a quotation in Byron's Journals: "When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse." How much life do we actually experience, when we aren't eating, sleeping, or scrolling through our phones? It doesn't bear thinking about.
But Mortimer does think about it, and he does so from the vantage point of someone who's led a busy, productive life and finds that, as he enters his golden years, things are speeding up. "In childhood," he writes, "the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons." His friend, the playwright Christopher Fry, who's 93, tells him that after the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. You don't have to be in your 90s to relate to that. It seems I just took down the Christmas decorations and now here we are in March. Stop the world, I say; I don't want to get off, exactly, but I'd like to slow it down.
I don't want to give you the impression that Dormouse is a litany of grievances - Mortimer, who died in 2009 at the age of 85, was not a grumpy old man. Not in print, anyway. His gentle, self-deprecating wit allowed him to relate the frustrations of aging in a way that makes you think, Well, if he can just get on with his life, so can I. He, after all, inherited from his father bronchial asthma, glaucoma, and a tendency for his retinas to become displaced; my father just passed down to me his bad teeth. Teeth can be replaced, eyes not so much. So, no whining!
One thing we share, he and I, is a dread of falling. I haven't so far, but he cheerfully describes four falling incidents which sound painful and traumatic, but do nothing to diminish his energy or optimism. As he says, it's simply another hazard of aging: "All over the world," he writes, "men and women who have experienced a reasonable quantity of life are toppling over, collapsing in kitchens or hurtling down stairs." It's a powerful image. Makes you wonder why every senior citizen in the neighbourhood isn't hobbling around on crutches. Or worse.
What I really like about Mortimer, besides the fact that he began every morning with a glass of champagne, is that he simply refused to retire. This book, written as I said in his 77th year, is jam-packed with activity. He flies off to Rome to stay with Franco Zeffirelli while writing the screenplay for the director's next film, Tea with Mussolini. He writes a TV film adaptation of Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee's beloved story of his Gloucestershire childhood. He accepts engagements to perform his work onstage at an arts centre in Eastleigh, a country house near Malvern, a school in Folkestone, and a Georgian theatre in Yorkshire. All this, and we're only on page 30.
John Mortimer made the most of his dormouse summer. He ate and drank what he wanted when he wanted and he championed the causes he believed in; most of these were on the left of the spectrum but he did stand up for fox-hunting, putting him at odds with animal rights activists. He never exercised, and worked like a Trojan, getting up around 5am to start work on a new novel or play or both, and finishing off with long gossipy lunches with friends followed by dinner and the theatre.
Mortimer had his serious side: he played an important part in the abolition of the death penalty in Britain and his argument in the case of Last Exit to Brooklyn ended the Lord Chamberlain's power of theatrical censorship. He championed penal reform and he and his wife, Penny, helped to establish a holiday home for deprived children. In 1986 he was awarded a CBE and he was knighted in 1998.
All of this, of course, you can get from Wikipedia. Or, since his death, from one of the many obits online. But to get a real sense of the man, of the writer, you need to spend some time with his writing. I'll leave you with a sample, written while he was on a book tour in the US, staying in a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin:
"Madison is in a cheese-producing area and its inhabitants, at times of celebration, wear hats shaped like huge cheeses. My hotel window looks out on an apparently boundless frozen lake and I see people cycling across the grey ice. Then small keel-less sailing boats skitter across, and holes are made in the ice for fishing. Brave people speed across it in four-wheel drives. In March, I am told, the lake starts to thaw. The first four-wheel drive falls in and occasionally its passengers drown. Then the inhabitants of Madison know that spring has come at last."
Love it.
So begins one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors. You may know John Mortimer better as the author of the "Rumpole" books: Rumpole of the Bailey, The Trials of Rumpole, Rumpole for the Defence, and so on. I have never read the Rumpole books, and I never got around to watching the BBC TV series Rumpole of the Bailey which ran for seven seasons, from April 1978 to December 1992.
My first introduction to the author were the Rapstone novels, written during the Thatcher era, and featuring the wonderfully execrable right-wing prig, Leslie Titmuss. Those three novels, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained, and The Sound of Trumpets, don't appear in my bookshelf at the moment - lost, I think, in one of my frequent moves. I'm making a note as we speak to replace them and read them again.
Mortimer was an enormously prolific writer. Besides the Rumpole novels - 20 of them, as well as the TV series - and the Rapstone books, he wrote nine other novels, 44 plays, and several volumes of autobiography; The Summer of a Dormouse is one of those and, like everything he wrote, it is delightful.
I'm actually a little surprised to find it here, in my apartment, as I like it so much I keep buying copies and giving them to friends for their birthdays. It's that kind of book. Although you wouldn't give it to someone younger than 50, I don't think. As it says on the book jacket, Mortimer describes what it's like to be 77 and still feel like you're 11. I'm not 77 - yet - but I can relate. I can still put on my own socks and walk without assistance but I've been known to swear at the writing on a bottle of pills and wonder why everybody mumbles.
The title is taken from a quotation in Byron's Journals: "When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse." How much life do we actually experience, when we aren't eating, sleeping, or scrolling through our phones? It doesn't bear thinking about.
But Mortimer does think about it, and he does so from the vantage point of someone who's led a busy, productive life and finds that, as he enters his golden years, things are speeding up. "In childhood," he writes, "the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons." His friend, the playwright Christopher Fry, who's 93, tells him that after the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. You don't have to be in your 90s to relate to that. It seems I just took down the Christmas decorations and now here we are in March. Stop the world, I say; I don't want to get off, exactly, but I'd like to slow it down.
I don't want to give you the impression that Dormouse is a litany of grievances - Mortimer, who died in 2009 at the age of 85, was not a grumpy old man. Not in print, anyway. His gentle, self-deprecating wit allowed him to relate the frustrations of aging in a way that makes you think, Well, if he can just get on with his life, so can I. He, after all, inherited from his father bronchial asthma, glaucoma, and a tendency for his retinas to become displaced; my father just passed down to me his bad teeth. Teeth can be replaced, eyes not so much. So, no whining!
One thing we share, he and I, is a dread of falling. I haven't so far, but he cheerfully describes four falling incidents which sound painful and traumatic, but do nothing to diminish his energy or optimism. As he says, it's simply another hazard of aging: "All over the world," he writes, "men and women who have experienced a reasonable quantity of life are toppling over, collapsing in kitchens or hurtling down stairs." It's a powerful image. Makes you wonder why every senior citizen in the neighbourhood isn't hobbling around on crutches. Or worse.
What I really like about Mortimer, besides the fact that he began every morning with a glass of champagne, is that he simply refused to retire. This book, written as I said in his 77th year, is jam-packed with activity. He flies off to Rome to stay with Franco Zeffirelli while writing the screenplay for the director's next film, Tea with Mussolini. He writes a TV film adaptation of Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee's beloved story of his Gloucestershire childhood. He accepts engagements to perform his work onstage at an arts centre in Eastleigh, a country house near Malvern, a school in Folkestone, and a Georgian theatre in Yorkshire. All this, and we're only on page 30.
John Mortimer made the most of his dormouse summer. He ate and drank what he wanted when he wanted and he championed the causes he believed in; most of these were on the left of the spectrum but he did stand up for fox-hunting, putting him at odds with animal rights activists. He never exercised, and worked like a Trojan, getting up around 5am to start work on a new novel or play or both, and finishing off with long gossipy lunches with friends followed by dinner and the theatre.
Mortimer had his serious side: he played an important part in the abolition of the death penalty in Britain and his argument in the case of Last Exit to Brooklyn ended the Lord Chamberlain's power of theatrical censorship. He championed penal reform and he and his wife, Penny, helped to establish a holiday home for deprived children. In 1986 he was awarded a CBE and he was knighted in 1998.
All of this, of course, you can get from Wikipedia. Or, since his death, from one of the many obits online. But to get a real sense of the man, of the writer, you need to spend some time with his writing. I'll leave you with a sample, written while he was on a book tour in the US, staying in a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin:
"Madison is in a cheese-producing area and its inhabitants, at times of celebration, wear hats shaped like huge cheeses. My hotel window looks out on an apparently boundless frozen lake and I see people cycling across the grey ice. Then small keel-less sailing boats skitter across, and holes are made in the ice for fishing. Brave people speed across it in four-wheel drives. In March, I am told, the lake starts to thaw. The first four-wheel drive falls in and occasionally its passengers drown. Then the inhabitants of Madison know that spring has come at last."
Love it.
February 4, 2015
I selected this off the shelf in my local public library because
(a) the surrounding modern celebrity biographies were of such comparatively boring lives; and
(b) the first two paragraphs in "The Summer of a Dormouse" applied so aptly to an older friend of mine who has recently had an operation on his knee. I have now just received an e-mail describing to me how enormously that passage has cheered him up!
John Mortimer had such a wonderful written style. Right on a knife edge. Very observant, yet he was a master at knowing how to lighten up JUST at the point where his gripes become a fraction irritating.
This book, being a series of musings over a number of months, ideally should be treated as a long term read, just a page or two at a sitting; preferably accompanied by a glass of Pimms & lemonade. I am conscious of having perhaps read it too quickly than it deserves.
February 29, 2024
I’m not sure what I think about this other than I read it and I enjoyed it. I don’t know the bloke, beyond recognising the name I hadn’t a scooby what he was about. He was ex lawyer, author, playwrite, oxfordian, posho etc etc.
He talks about (I think) the year 1999 and how he feels in his aging years. The approach to death and just general shit. Politics, the arts, gossip, writing, etc.
I think if I knew more about him I probably wouldn’t like him but I enjoyed his book and he is quite funny at times. I’m sure he was a lecherous old perv by the way he talks about certain things but that requires more research.
Anyway he’s dead now rip.
Probably would read another of his earlier autobiographies. The best parts are when he harks back to his days in law with courtroom tales.
If this book was a cricketer it would be Sam Billings. Posh, pretentious, well spoken, but ultimately quite charming and likeable. Can spin a yarn and bats with great flare at times and great care at others.
He talks about (I think) the year 1999 and how he feels in his aging years. The approach to death and just general shit. Politics, the arts, gossip, writing, etc.
I think if I knew more about him I probably wouldn’t like him but I enjoyed his book and he is quite funny at times. I’m sure he was a lecherous old perv by the way he talks about certain things but that requires more research.
Anyway he’s dead now rip.
Probably would read another of his earlier autobiographies. The best parts are when he harks back to his days in law with courtroom tales.
If this book was a cricketer it would be Sam Billings. Posh, pretentious, well spoken, but ultimately quite charming and likeable. Can spin a yarn and bats with great flare at times and great care at others.
June 13, 2019
I rarely read memoirs and was only moved to read this one because of my great love of Horace Rumpole. This book won't be a disappointment. Mortimer was in many ways a creature from another time, that type of old-school liberal soul who happily would disagree with you but would also be willing to buy you a glass of wine to talk it over.
This is very much a book about ideas and principle as much as it is a book about growing old "disgracefully." We'll all get there, if we're lucky, and it's nice to know that even if a day comes when we can no longer put on our own socks, we don't have to give up being who we are.
If you like intelligence, principle, and a good story well told, you'll like this.
This is very much a book about ideas and principle as much as it is a book about growing old "disgracefully." We'll all get there, if we're lucky, and it's nice to know that even if a day comes when we can no longer put on our own socks, we don't have to give up being who we are.
If you like intelligence, principle, and a good story well told, you'll like this.
June 20, 2017
An episodic third volume of his autobiography, Mortimer contemplates life aged 70 plus and the challenges of getting one's socks on. Living in a wheelchair, remembering his father's blindness, his reflections are wise and tempered, reflecting a lifetime of reading, writing, and theater. In this volume, he looks at the failure of the Labour party and the the dangerous undermining of the British right to a trial by jury. There are lots of lovely one-liners and name dropping. The memoirs seem to be written informally as memories occur and then are organized later in a somewhat chronological manner--a good approach to autobiography.
March 1, 2021
What a writer and story-teller!...it rankles me that I discovered Mortimer so comparatively late in life. And he himself passed away in 2009. Of course I had watched his works without knowing it: movies and t.v. programs. And now I know he is a very funny writer, I laughed out loud many times and feared I would fall off the treadmill. I would highly recommend the book for Mortimer's intelligent observations and low key view of life from a comic perspective.
July 15, 2019
Many funny anecdotes based on real people. An excellent view of Mortimer’s thinking about the theatre arts, etc. Very accessible writing.
I read it based on BBC’s list of books to read at every age; however, I didn’t read The Hungry Caterpillar ‘TIL our first child-50yrs ago.
I read it based on BBC’s list of books to read at every age; however, I didn’t read The Hungry Caterpillar ‘TIL our first child-50yrs ago.
July 19, 2018
I was not familiar with the Rumpole stories and John Mortimer in general, but this memoir of sorts had some insightful comments about getting old (but still remaining active!).
December 23, 2018
Humane, witty, wise, full of anecdote and resounding namedrops. To act in old age like John Mortimer, spiritually and intellectually at least, should be the ambition of us all.
March 5, 2019
Intimations of mortality? Embrace it and find another way of putting your socks on!
July 22, 2019
Entertaining reflection on his life, the interesting people he has met, and how dealing with old age infirmities can be a cross to bear, but many times enlightening.
November 8, 2020
An enjoyable meander through the musings of Mortimer in old age
September 28, 2021
Utterly charming, very funny in places, sometimes ruder than you’d expect! A marvellous insight into the life and mind of the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.
July 29, 2015
Aged 65, I can now begin to imagine why one might resort to a device to get socks on, this being an episode among many recounted by John Mortimer that is, at once, funny and poignant. It must be shocking, though, to find that falling over, bumping into objects and people, and the marked decline in faculties, not least those that keep one continent, has become part of daily life.
Mortimer’s achievement in “Summer of a Doormouse” is to observe and describe his decline but, also, to remind us of his life as writer of a good many works as well as the Rumpole stories, barrister, public figure, chair of high-profile committees and institutions, and someone who knew many people, famous and not well known other than as relatives, friends and acquaintances of John Mortimer. Although no autobiography is objective, Mortimer’s account of a phase of his later life manages to convey the intermittent fear of dying while continuing to live on. “The Summer of a Doormouse” also manages to cover plenty that is of considerable national and international worth without being an advertisement for himself or a settling of scores. However, there isn’t any reluctance in having a say on politicians – more those of the New Labour era than of Conservatives because he clearly feels both betrayed by Tony Blair et al and affronted by the way in which they occupied the public sphere: “the feeling of having waited so long for a powerful Labour government, which would improve social justice, care for public services, nurture the arts and protect civil liberties, only to get one whose ideas of justice can be dictated by focus groups and last week's headlines.” Even when a certain perverseness characterizes his libertarian outlook, Mortimer is worth listening to – literally in this audiobook, which has an added value in helping us to remember him and why he matters to British public life following his death in 2009.
Mortimer’s achievement in “Summer of a Doormouse” is to observe and describe his decline but, also, to remind us of his life as writer of a good many works as well as the Rumpole stories, barrister, public figure, chair of high-profile committees and institutions, and someone who knew many people, famous and not well known other than as relatives, friends and acquaintances of John Mortimer. Although no autobiography is objective, Mortimer’s account of a phase of his later life manages to convey the intermittent fear of dying while continuing to live on. “The Summer of a Doormouse” also manages to cover plenty that is of considerable national and international worth without being an advertisement for himself or a settling of scores. However, there isn’t any reluctance in having a say on politicians – more those of the New Labour era than of Conservatives because he clearly feels both betrayed by Tony Blair et al and affronted by the way in which they occupied the public sphere: “the feeling of having waited so long for a powerful Labour government, which would improve social justice, care for public services, nurture the arts and protect civil liberties, only to get one whose ideas of justice can be dictated by focus groups and last week's headlines.” Even when a certain perverseness characterizes his libertarian outlook, Mortimer is worth listening to – literally in this audiobook, which has an added value in helping us to remember him and why he matters to British public life following his death in 2009.
July 3, 2009
More a collection of cocktail party anecdotes than reflections upon living near the end of life, The Summer Of A Dormouse is nevertheless entertaining, especially to fans of Mortimer's by turns progressive and reactionary worldview. On the subject of how to live a good life it has little to say except what we already knew: Old age is more bearable with the aid of fame, fortune, family and happy memories of mis-spent youth, but even these comforts are eventually inadequate as our ability to perceive pleasure is blunted by age and infirmity.
June 6, 2009
Another of the amusing "aging memoirs" which tickle me of late, this by the creator of the Rumpole series of books and tv about his years as a playright. He quotes Lord Byron "when one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning -- how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse."
September 13, 2015
John Mortimer wrote this book when he was 77, not losing a step with his with, charm, and ability to write a beautiful sentence. The books is a memoir of one year's happenings. He's so kind when he writes that he speaks of one rich man's wife as a "gifted shopper."
Mortimer is dead now, but people will go on reading his books because he was so talented.
Mortimer is dead now, but people will go on reading his books because he was so talented.
March 17, 2013
In this third installment of his memoirs John Mortimer reflects on the onset of old age by announcing that: 'At this age it's really no use worrying.' This quote sums up the memoir for me - I rather read a Rumpole story than worry about finishing text.
November 5, 2009
How to grow old disgracefully! More wit and wisdom from Mortimer.
February 13, 2015
mortimer the man and rumpole the character are practically the same thing.
August 2, 2011
Delightful, warm and funny account of the latter stages of an eventful life (the subtitle 'A year of growing old disgracefully' says it all. Beautifully written.
February 11, 2012
A great read, full of wry observations about everything from theatre funding to fox hunting via naked Dames!
I loved it and would like to read more of his memoirs.
I loved it and would like to read more of his memoirs.
February 20, 2013
A delightful book from an extraordinary and extremely open-minded man.
April 12, 2017
The man is a genius. Getting older is a bit of a mixed experience, but it has not blunted Mortimer's wit one iota. A wonderful interlude from the man who gave us Rumpole. For which I am truly grateful.
February 21, 2018
Light, easy, enjoyable with lots of name-dropping
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews