Jeremy Hutchinson QC on the Bloomsbury group

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Jeremy Hutchinson QC celebrated his hundredth birthday in March. He grew up with the Bloomsbury group and knew Virginia Woolf, who he says "was sparkling and fun and marvellous with young people". He defended Penguin in the Lady Chatterley trail, which he says was "at the time... a watershed case". He acted for the spies George Blake and William Vassall, and spent years in courtroom battles with Mary Whitehouse on questions of censorship and freedom. He claims the arguments in the 1960s about public morality were about "taking to pieces this society of the deference, of secrets, of censorship. All these things were being demolished". All this and a career as a criminal barrister that, John Mortimer said, gave him some of the inspiration for his great creation, Rumpole of the Bailey.