Animal QC: My Preposterous Life - Softcover

Gary Bell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906308667 ISBN 13: 9781906308667

Publisher: Monday Books, 2016

Synopsis

GARY BELL QC is one of Britain's top barristers, with his own hit BBC TV show The Legalizer (he's now working on series two), a Who's Who entry and a wife whose family is listed in Burke's Landed Gentry.

But behind his silk gown and horsehair wig is a compelling and hilarious backstory.

The chronic bedwetting son of a teenaged cigarette factory worker and a nineteen-year-old miner, Gary grew up in a condemned Nottingham slum and left his tough comprehensive school without taking any exams to follow his dad down the pit.

He spent his teenage years as a drunken football hooligan known as Animal (for his terrible eating habits, not his fighting skills), baking pies at Pork Farms, stacking shelves at Asda, and trying and failing to become (among other things) a miner, a bricklayer, and a fireman. After being convicted of fraud and sentenced to six months (he worked out how to fiddle pub fruit machines), he was homeless for some years.

Finally deciding to make something of himself, he took O and A levels and hitch-hiked to Bristol University as a mature law student in his mid 20s. After three hilarious years he somehow managed to wangle a job with a Beverly Hills law firm before he'd even graduated. He went on to become a barrister and, twenty years later, achieved the rare honour of being appointed Queen's Counsel.

His preposterous story which contains some fascinating details of the many major cases he has worked on reads like a strange dream and redefines the word amazing, as well as being extremely funny, very moving, and utterly life-affirming.

To listen to Gary being interviewed by Libby Purves on Midweek on Radio 4 please follow the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0610175

About this title

Review

'An extraordinary yarn, a great autobiography... Marvel Comics could take Gary Bell on.' --Libby Purves, BBC Radio Four Midweek

'Unvarnished candour... riotous... Benign, witty and effortlessly charming, Gary Bell certainly seems a far cry from the animal of the title.' -- Angela Epstein, Daily Telegraph

'You might expect a QC's autobiography to limber up with a few droll tales from prep and public school before moving on to dewy-eyed memories of golden summers at Oxford. Well, not this one.' --Daily Mail

'A really good yarn' -- Naga Munchetty, BBC Breakfast

'A legal champion for the underdog' -- Bill Turnbull, BBC Breakfast

'Fascinating' -- Dan Walker, BBC Radio 5 Live Afternoon Edition

'Enthralling... funny... inspirational... Local boy made good? That doesn't quite cover the life story of Gary Bell, bad local boy made very, very good. Just as he has a gift for the spoken word when pleading a case in court, he is handy with the written word too. Rags-to-riches memoirs can leave you begging to punch the author but here the enormity of the gap between his wretched beginnings in Radford and St Ann's and his life as a lawyer are handled with good humour and an eye for a telling phrase.' -- Jeremy Lewis, Nottingham Evening Post

'Hugely entertaining, [a] remarkable, heartwarming and inspiring story.' --Mail on Sunday

Edition details

• Publisher: Monday Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1906308667
• ISBN 13: 9781906308667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332