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Stephen Sedley

  • Judge for yourself by James Pickles
    Smith Gryphon, 242 pp, £15.99, April 1992, ISBN 1 85685 019 6
  • The Barrister’s World by John Morison and Philip Leith
    Open University, 256 pp, £35.00, December 1991, ISBN 0 335 09396 5
  • Advocates by David Pannick
    Oxford, 305 pp, £15.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 19 811948 8

The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common. No, what’s odd about Pickles is that, as his book repeatedly reveals, he is an unimaginative authoritarian who has somehow managed to break all the rules in his private war against unimaginative authoritarians.

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