Book description
Following the bestselling SUMMER OF A DORMOUSE, Sir John Mortimer -
playwright, novelist, octogenarian and erstwhile QC - offers up more
wickedly funny lessons in living and growing old disgracefully. What
would we like to leave to our descendants? Not a third-rate painting or
our PEPS, according to Sir John, but a love of Shakespeare, a taste for
alcohol, the ability to defeat boredom, the importance of never locking
the lavatory door, and so on. Owing something to Montaigne's essays,
something to Wilde's aphorisms and something to Yeats' poem for his
daughter, Where There's a Will offers plenty of sparkling and surprising
advice from one who has seen it all.
Sir John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising
barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and
published a number of novels, before turning to theatre. He has
written many film scripts, and plays for both radio and television,
including A Voyage Round My Father, the Rumpole plays, which won him
the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Many of his Rumpole stories are
published in Penguin, as are two volumes of his acclaimed
autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage and Murderers and Other
Friends, and the bestselling Summer of a Dormouse. His novels include
Summer's Lease, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of
Trumpets.
Sir John lives with his wife and their youngest daughter in what was
once his father's house in the Chilterns. He received a knighthood for
his services to the arts in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours list.
