Passing judgment on a career

MEMOIRS OF SIR MICHAEL OGDEN QCBy Sir Michael Ogden QCThe Book Guild Ltd, 16.95Jeremy Fleming

Sir Michael Ogden, a former deputy High Court judge and former chairman of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, says he wrote his memoirs for his own amusement, but 'both publishers whom I approached to publish it privately encouraged me to do it more widely'.

This opening modesty - a conventional trait in the judiciary - is emblematic of the book.

Sir Michael's work will also confirm a few other stereotypes of judges to those who seek them - public school, a cavalry officer during the Second World War, Cambridge ('in those days there was never any question about being accepted') and later, a prospective Conservative MP.

The background is amusingly written.

Sir Michael's frequent and sharp anecdotes about drinking keep up a comic tempo.

His godfather - appropriately a member of the Gilbey drinks family - 'having been to a party in London, woke up in Liverpool about a week later, wearing someone else's clothes, with no recollection of the interim'.

But Sir Michael soon disabuses the modesty of his introduction.

Colleagues are dispatched in one-liners.

Tory foreign minister during the Suez crisis, Selwyn Lloyd: 'I thought he was a real lightweight'; Margaret Thatcher: 'Had anyone suggested that she would become prime minister, I would have been amazed'; Lord Denning: 'He was frequently asked to make after-dinner speeches, but he delivered the same speech each time'.

Sir Michael is frank in his opinions on people and places.

His memoirs paint a picture of a bygone Englishness, which also manifests itself frequently in class-consciousness.

On working as a silk for a soldier and being an equivalent rank to determine where he dined, Sir Michael was overjoyed to be a major general, while 'Philip [Otton] and our solicitors were colonels.'

This is definitely a view of Britain and a life in the judiciary through horn-rimmed spectacles, but occasionally the focus of the lenses is sharp.