The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

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At seventeen he went up to Brasenose College Oxford where he read law though he was actually based at Christ Church because the Brasenose buildings had been requisitioned for the war effort. However Graham Lord's unofficial biography John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate revealed in 2005 that none of Mortimer's submitted scripts had in fact been used and that the screenplay was actually written by the series producer and director. For the first and in fact the only time in my life I was thanks to Laurie Lee earning my living entirely as a writer.

Sir John Clifford Mortimer CBE QC (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was a British barrister dramatist screenwriter and author.