He was of the “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” school of thinking. My father defended a lot of murderers - his favorite clients, because he said they had generally got rid of the one person on earth who was really bugging them, and a kind of peace had descended over them - but his other specialty was obscenity. He was an author and a criminal defense barrister - in his words, “the only playwright ever to have defended a murderer in the central criminal court at the Old Bailey” - and his prowess in both professions rode on his ability to see past easy morality and to respect the fact that the truth is never one-sided and therefore art should not be, either. My father, John Mortimer, brought me up to believe that you can be a good person and kill someone and a perfectly awful person who never gets so much as a parking ticket your whole life.
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