Dr James Allan: The Outgoing Tide of Freedom

John Mortimer’s memorable fictional creation Rumpole of the Bailey loved to quote the great lines of English poetry. One of Rumpole’s favourite recited retellings was Wordsworth’s poem that begins “It is not to be thought of that the flood of British freedom, which, to the open sea of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity hath flowed ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood’… should perish.” And that claim was still true when Mortimer was writing about Rumpole in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alas, it is not true today.