Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Having first disguised himself under alias as Martin Vernon in case his Bluffer's Guide to Law caused him to be struck off, David Mitchell now feels sufficiently safe to own up to being himself. At the age of nine he was dispatched to Sussex where he spent seven years dressed in knee breeches and yellow stockings marching up and down to a band. These peculiar traits, combined with the failure of his studies in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, inexorably led to a career in the law. He has pursued the sport of litigation in London, occasionally in foreign climes, and now in the Midlands. He has dabbled as a Deputy District Judge and is now a mediator (which he reckons is like meditation in front of an audience) but regards squash as the only proper alternative activity, perhaps influenced by his disabilities at tennis, golf, windsurfing, skiing and sex. Observation of the failures of others during his time spent as a divorce lawyer has sustained his own happy marriage and amused his long-suffering family. A senior partner within his firm, he has been heard to observe that a partnership is like marriage, but that he never expected to have around 25 spouses, nor that only three of them would be women. (Biography obtained from Amazon.com's product description of The Bluffer's Guide to Law: Bluff Your Way in Law.)