The real wizard of Oz

What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job was in court and who moonlighted in the Commons — think F.E. Smith. But it is impossible today to double up with any distinction. As long as capital punishment survived, public attention also attached to those great defenders who rescued their clients from the noose — think Edward Marshall Hall. But English judges no longer don the black cap to pronounce the sentence of death.

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of this riveting memoir, ticks the boxes which guarantee the reputation of the modern celebrity silk: chiefly, a concentration on the fashion-able area of human rights, with a special interest in press freedom, making him a hero of the left-wing media. A prominent member of the Australian diaspora — along with Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and his wife Kathy Lette (they’ve now separated), the paronomasiac comic author — he has pursued a career unusual in its peripatetic nature and the variety (and notoriety) of his clients.

After cutting his teeth as a student activist in Sydney, he joined the defence team in London of the magazine Oz — which had been charged with conspiracy to corrupt public morals — and graduated through a series of obscenity trials to represent Julian Assange, Salman Rushdie, the directors of Matrix Churchill, ethnic minority Indians, victims of a Fijian constitutional coup, and, in Hong Kong, refugees in flight from Vietnamese persecution. As well as taking on demanding death-row cases in the Caribbean, he can claim credit for such developments in the law as the protection of journalists’ sources; the defence of provocation for battered wives; the identification of the limits of the law of treason and of claims to diplomatic immunity.