To Inner Temple, where campaign group Justice achieved a coup by persuading novelist Julian Barnes to help launch a £2m appeal for the organisation’s 60th anniversary.

Barnes (pictured), described by Baroness Helena Kennedy as a ‘reluctant’ speaker, read from his bestselling book Arthur & George about the ‘Great Wyrley Outrages’.

These concerned George Edalji, an Anglo-Indian solicitor who, at the start of the last century, served three years hard labour after being convicted on a charge of horse maiming. He was pardoned after a campaign led by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The garrulous Kennedy did not allow the taciturn Barnes to make light of his credentials in fictionalising the affair. Did you know that the Man Booker Prize winner (The Sense of an Ending, 2011) was called to the bar but never practised? His Who’s Who and Wikipedia entries make no mention of it.

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