Featured New Authors
Featured Author: John Mortimer
Featured Author: John Mortimer
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
In This Feature
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 Nicole Bengiveno/ The New York Times |
| John Mortimer |
(1982)
“. . . [an] elegant and entertaining autobiography . . . Mortimer is fascinating about the law and the subtleties of its theatrics.”
(1986)
“. . . has an appealingly old-fashioned quality, inherent in the author’s solicitous attitude toward plot, character and language. . . . Mortimer’s wry authorial tone steers delicately between sentiment and satire.
In his skillful hands, we seem to be viewing the world from a very great distance . . .”
(1987)
“In ‘Charade,’ Mr. Mortimer’s charming first novel (published originally in England in 1947, when he was only 23), the author shows us exactly how he developed his clever parlor trick of using structural
elements of the mystery to support more ambitious themes.”
(1988)
“Mortimer had fun with ‘Summer’s Lease.’ His readers will too, whether they dream of a villa in Tuscany or a beach in the Hamptons.”
(1989)
“Originally published in Britain in 1954, and now released here for the first time . . . Perhaps he had not yet found his voice as a humorist, but he was already in command of the medium of fiction. . . . a mature and original
accomplishment . . .”
(1990)
“. . . a classic comedy of political manners . . . an astute and rather insightful study of the conservative mind — not the intellectual mind but the emotional one . . . a delightful book, funny, wise and ultimately very
sad.”
(1990)
“These occasional pieces contain all the virtues and flaws of their genre, being well written, amusing, intelligent and deft at touching lightly on serious concerns, but also being arch, narrowly focused and predictable.”
(1992)
“What gives these stories their special flavor, as each case proceeds to trial in the Old Bailey, is not the lawyers or their clients, but the way that Rumpole pokes at judicial pomposity.”
(1993)
“Few American novelists are content to write a nice little novel like ‘Dunster’ . . . ‘Dunster’ is hardly original or visionary, but is anyway, and perhaps therefore, a delicious read, like a meal you
expect to enjoy, and do.”
(1995)
” . . . an amiable codicil to his 1982 autobiography . . . the form this time is not so much shaped by history as it is by whim and a thirst for the entertaining, well-told (and probably oft-told) after-dinner anecdote.”
(1996)
“Mr. Mortimer knows his territory, and his comments on the vagaries of the English legal system and the small value it places on common sense and moral standards are as sharp as ever . . . In Rumpole, Mr. Mortimer has created
a wonderfully durable and attractive character, henpecked as a husband but masterful with a jury . . .”
(1997)
“The slings and arrows of Felix’s latest book tour and his genteel-shabby literary life are among the pleasures of this witty work . . . Mortimer is an old pro at plotting.”
(November 3, 1959)
“The ironic humor of British playwright John Mortimer was demonstrated on television last night as two of his works were presented on ‘The Play of the Week’ . . . a laudable effort to do something
original on the television screen.”
(March 20, 1960)
“‘The Wrong Side of the Park’ was easily the most important theatrical event in London last month, and the most distinguished. . . . [It] is perceptive and profound beyond the ordinary, [and its] author
has proved himself a man of mark.”
(November 22, 1961)
“There are plenty of words in John Mortimer’s two one-act plays, ‘What Shall We Tell Caroline?’ and ‘The Dock Brief.’ But they do not really signify enough.”
(August 12, 1970)
” . . . a pertinent and amusing battle report from the sexual revolution. . . . Mortimer does not make jokes, he tells funny stories. And the quality of the fun varies sometimes alarmingly from story to story.”
(October 26, 1980)
“One wishes one could say more in praise of ‘Come as You Are,’ but there isn’t much to come up with. It is an extremely light evening of froth that is neither painful nor educational.”
(January 31, 1982)
“‘Brideshead Revisited’ will certainly be ranked as one of the most memorable television productions of the decade. . . . Mortimer has been a bit too faithful to the novel . . . a handsome production
spanning ll episodes might have been more dramatically effective in seven or eight.”
(April 15, 1984)
In this interview, Mortimer talks about “Voyage Round My Father”, a tribute to a vanished social tribe as well as his own father, that began as a BBC Radio sketch in 1966 and evolved over the years into a
TV film in 1982.
(October 11, 1984)
John J. O’Connor says that “Rumpole Returns” — a two-hour TV special with Leo McKern reprising his role as Mortimer’s irascible barrister, Horace Rumpole — is “decidedly plodding.”
(October 19, 1986)
“The Paradise in the story is what we were going to have after the war: no unemployment, no class distinctions, hardly any Conservatives,” says Mortimer in this interview about his TV special, “Paradise
Postponed.” “Now we’ve got Conservatives, class distinctions, unemployment. It’s where we started.”
(May 12, 1990)
“Dickens dealt with social issues by making them funny and laughing at them, as in ‘Bleak House,’ where he dealt with the delays of the law and bureauracy by making it comic,” said Mortimer in this
interview after the publication of “Titmus Regained.” “I try to do something similar.”
(May 27, 1993)
“‘Rumpole of the Bailey,’ currently in its sixth season . . . [is] now on automatic pilot with perfunctory plots and set-in-concrete character shticks. . . . Still, the old warhorse has its endearing moments.”
(April 12, 1995)
In this interview conducted as a new six-part “Rumpole” TV special hit American shores, Mortimer says of his career as a barrister, “My whole life has been spent helping people to avoid their just fate.”
(January 17, 1982)
“What I hope the television ‘Brideshead Revisited’ may do,” writes Mortimer in this essay about his adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” for TV, “Is give the viewer the feeling
that he is living through the book and experiencing it at the length and, as nearly as possible, in the way the author intended.”
(December 6, 1992)
The year is 1894 and Mortimer imagines “Tiny Tim,” of “Christmas Carol” fame, now known as Sir Timothy Cratchit, lounging with his friend Oscar Wilde in North Africa.
(December 24, 1993)
Looking over Dickens’s original manuscript for “A Christmas Carol,” Mortimer discovers that “Dickens agonized over his plots.”
(January 8, 1995)
In this tribute to the playwright John Osborne, Mortimer writes, that “Osborne’s anger was in defense of old values of courage and honor.”
(September 3, 1995)
In this appreciation, Mortimer writes, “In his prose, as in his drawings, Max Beerbohm hardly knew failure; time and again the nail is delicately but sharply hit on the head, the point firmly driven home.”
(July 9, 1995)
“The absence of self-doubt is apparent in the book, and she writes of her policies without any consideration of their possible ill effects. . . . In its final section the lack of self-awareness, or self-examination,
becomes a fatal flaw.”
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