Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is the barrister Michael Mansfield. One of Britain's

leading QCs he describes himself as a radical lawyer. The Birmingham Six

the Martianess disaster, the Stephen

Lawrence trial and the killing of Jean- Charles Sheminezes are only a handful of the

high-profile cases he's been involved in. Born into a conventional military church-going family, his

formative link with the law was made as a boy when his mother challenged the

police after being wrongly accused of parking too close to a pedestrian crossing. She won. He says, I do feel that

reputation, standing up for principle, is one of the few ways in which a difference can be made.

Michael Mansfield, I think it's the case with young lawyers that you're told you've got

to be impartial and that that will enable you to do your job best.

Were you told that as a young lawyer and have you followed it?

Yes, you'll definitely tell that.

It's regarded as a professional distance in a sense that you stand off a bit like surgeons I suppose and each case comes

along as another body and you mustn't become identified or involved because you get too close

you lose a sense of judgment. Well, it seemed to me the

only way I really wanted to do the job was to get inside the shell, the shoes of the person

or persons that I'm representing. You have to live their lives in order to

communicate the feelings and understand how they've got in the position they're in.

You are incredibly high profile, unsurprisingly given so many of the cases that you've fought. Is that something

...