John Mortimer never met a criminal he didn't want to rescue from what he saw as the absurd maze of the law (“Never plead guilty” he told clients), or a liberty he didn't seek to safeguard or heard a story he didn't think could be polished into a wittier anecdote.

He was a man of lively passions, many of which he managed to pursue vigorously and simultaneously (he liked to describe his typical day as “breakfast in a cell with a murderer, lunch with a judge and dinner with an actress”). He leaves a wife, an ex-wife, several children, plays, novels and indeed, a flamboyant private life. Writing made him famous. Courage made him champion freedom of speech and civil liberties in a world where it has become too easy to forget how fiercely people once fought to gain these. If you were ever unsure on which side of a barricade to stand, it was a safe bet to join the side that Mortimer was on. “Liberty,” he said, “is allowing people to do things you disapprove of.”

He defended the publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn and the Oz Schoolkids' issue. He acted for Gay News when it was accused of publishing a blasphemous poem. “The attitude of censorship,” he wrote, “depends on the assumption that there is a superior type of person qualified to tell the rest of us what it is good for us to read.”

But he never let the law dull his appetite for gaiety or for mischief, making his courtroom appearances as spirited as an episode of his alter ego, Rumpole. A judge once interrupted a trial to tell the court: “It may surprise jurors to know that the sole purpose of the English judicial system is not to amuse Mr Mortimer.” Happily, though, it did. And through him, all of us.