[There] is no doubt that Mortimer's Rumpole is like something out of Wodehouse in that he has become, seemingly over-night, an institution like Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. In America they even have a Rumpole Society. But Rumpole, under all that eccentricity and the oceans of wine at Pomeroy's Fleet Street wine bar, is a radical just as his maker John Mortimer is a radical. Underneath the paraphernalia Rumpole carries about—which includes his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed; Nick, the appalling sociologist son now living happily in the even more appalling Miami, Florida; plus the sometimes very crude tricks of plots there is a continuous radical message being beamed out at us. Perhaps radical is not the best word to use. What it simply means is that Rumpole is always for the weak against the strong, for the little man against the big man and that, surprisingly...