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The worlds of law and literature yesterday mourned their joint hero, Sir John Mortimer, creator of the immortal Rumpole of the Bailey, the crumpled champion of the common man.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: <span style="font-weight: bold">"John Mortimer really was a national treasure. </span>I was brought up on Horace Rumpole, not least in his last big case defending the innocent Dr Khan from the horrors of the Terrorism Act."
Geoffrey Robertson QC, his junior on many epic legal battles for free speech in the 1970s, and a lifelong friend, called him "the Guardian's man for all seasons".
Sir Richard Eyre, the stage and film director, said: "It's easy to see him as a bit of a dilettante, in law and in writing, but that would be wrong. He was very, very serious and knowledgeable about law and life, about liberty and jurisprudence in its political sense."
According to his family: "Sir John Mortimer died peacefully at six o'clock this morning at his home in the Chiltern Hills. His wife and family were at his side."
The house was familiar to millions of television viewers as the setting for his 1969 television adaptation of his fond and furious memoir, A Voyage Round My Father, starring Laurence Olivier - Eyre said the original book would outlive Rumpole.
Mortimer's home at Turville Heath was near the village of Turville in Buckinghamshire where he held court among local celebrities including Jeremy Paxman and Melvyn Bragg.
He had been ill for some time, but until earlier this year was a regular in his wheelchair at literary and theatrical parties, champagne glass in hand. He gave his last performance at the Henley Literary Festival in September, attended the studio recording of a Rumpole story for BBC Radio 4 just before Christmas, and as he finally gave in to failing eyesight, was dictating Rumpole's latest adventures until a few weeks ago.
His long-term editor at Penguin, Tony Lacey, described him as the last of the great lunchers. He said: "A real throwback to the glory days of the 70s and 80s in publishing - I used his name shamelessly to get the best seats at the Ivy or Sheekey's."
Under the superb anecdotes and the jokes - he insisted in a recent interview that he rarely fought with his wife, but when he did, he transcribed her choicer remarks straight into the mouth of Rumpole's ferocious Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed - his admirers insisted he was a very serious man, passionate about human rights.
The novelist Margaret Drabble said: "His record in defending literature and attacking censorship was brilliant. And he did it with such good humour - it was very hard to get cross with John. He was so unpompous about his defence of literature."
The author and playwright Alan Bennett said: "You couldn't dislike the man. He was a great entertainer."
Both Eyre and Lacey, his editor, detected an occasional insecurity about how his work would endure. "He was forever asking 'How am I doing? Is it time for me to give up'?" Lacey said.
"For me he was the dream author, forever anxious to get on to the next project."
His last published work was a few paragraphs in a travel feature in the Telegraph, on his ideal weekend in a regularly rented Italian villa: he was already terminally ill when it appeared, but it conjured a vision as friends and admirers will remember him, on a sunny terrace, family and friends in attendance, Prosecco bubbling in the glass, a visiting cardinal from the Vatican playing Gershwin on the piano.
