LOOKING BACK: A Story of a Judge and his Family

She drives slowly, methodically, as if determined to provide concrete evidence of every allegation in the book. Last year, her sister Patsy came to the defence of her mother in an article in the Mail on Sunday. She labelled Ugly a pack of lies, the fictional work of a self-hater. Patsy claimed that Eastman was a gentle giant, that Constance was not beaten or sexually abused, as Constance claimed had happened on one occasion, and that the suicide attempt was fabricated.

She intends to go all the way with her legal action. At the same time, another sister, Pauline, provided a statement in which she took issue with a couple of details in Ugly, but said her mother was a woman who had set her whole family against each other. Briscoe says she is keen for me to talk to the family and passes on the numbers of various siblings and her mother.

Her sister, Christine, also a lawyer, tells me she'd rather not get involved and the others don't return my calls. Angela Fuentes is in her 70s now and living back in Spain. As a young woman she had been friendly with Carmen, but she says their relationship soured when she saw how Carmen treated Constance. Fuentes believes that Ugly is a true account of Briscoe's childhood. She still calls Briscoe Clare, as she was known in her childhood. Carmen was a no-good mother. Yes, Clare wet the bed, but many children wet their bed. She thought she was ugly, but it was in her head.

Carmen Briscoe's solicitor, Ade Soyege, tells me that he thinks the libel action will come to court early this year, but he doesn't want to say any more at the moment. It has been suggested that if Briscoe were to lose, she could be expelled from the bar for bringing it into disrepute. Does the thought of a court case worry her?

Far from it, she says, bring it on. We need some closure. Briscoe talks about it all in a clinical fashion. She sends me a batch of documents to back up her case. In , St Thomas' hospital sent the following heartbreaking letter to her GP: She was anxious, tearful and unwilling to go home. She told a nurse that her mother had crashed a plane into her face and cut her hand with a knife because she upset a chicken [sic]. She claimed that her stepfather had burnt her hand with a butt and touched her privates.

She is not suicidal but admitted a prior failed attempt at taking her life to go to heaven.

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Some of the dates on the documents don't tally with those in her book. Briscoe admits many of them are wrong.

She resents it, but says it is a battle that has to be fought. The new book, Beyond Ugly, reveals how, as soon as Briscoe got to university, she set about reinventing herself. She discovered that she was christened Constance, and reverted to that name. Next, she underwent plastic surgery- having her nose narrowed, mouth straightened, lips thinned, eye bags removed, and teeth straightened and whitened. Clare didn't even exist. Does she feel better for the surgery?

As a child, she had watched Crown Court on television and seen the barristers at work in their fancy wigs. When she was 13 she met Michael Mansfield on a school trip to Knightsbridge crown court, told him she was destined to be a barrister and asked if he'd help out. He told her to get in touch when she was ready.

She did, and his chambers took her on for her pupillage. But things didn't work out. Perhaps Briscoe was never going to thrive at a leftwing chambers such as Mansfield's Tooks Court. She might vote Labour, but she prides herself on having sent her son and daughter to the best public schools, and despises many aspects of what she regards as political correctness. In Beyond Ugly, she describes her miserable time at Tooks Court, where she says she clashed with three young black women barristers. Again, she delights in naming names and settling scores, labelling them the three witches.

I wasn't one of them - I wore too much make-up, straightened my hair, was sleepin' with a white bloke. She lived with the father of her two children, Adam Wilson, for 12 years. Her partner now is Anthony Arlidge, QC and author, 20 years her senior. Briscoe still bristles when looking back on how she was treated at Tooks Court.

Having been told by her mother that she was too black, now some of her colleagues seemed to be suggesting that she wasn't black enough. You can't win really, can you? So what if you straighten your hair - it doesn't mean you lose your identity. But then in the early 80s, people paid attention to that sort of rubbish. The real problem they had was that I did not come along under a black banner. They also hated the name, Constance, awfully British.

It was the young black women who took against Constance. It was partly about that competition. And here was a very bonny, vivacious girl - and let me tell you the older guys in chambers liked her very much. The women thought she would be Mike's favourite. They were fearful of what Constance in chambers would mean for them. But Kennedy, who fought for her to be retained, says Briscoe did not make it easy for herself.

Even though she appeared extrovert, she was a loner. She wasn't good at being one of the girls. Kennedy says that reading Ugly helped her understand Briscoe. I suppose if you've been mistreated as a child and your mother decides for whatever reason to make you a scapegoat, you're going to be distrustful of close relationships.

I do feel strongly that chambers let her down. She describes being interviewed at his chambers and Griffiths asking whether she could provide a reference other than the lawyer Mike Fisher a former boyfriend. Briscoe took objection to the implication. When she sent Griffiths the part of the manuscript that recounted this episode, he denied the interview had ever taken place. Briscoe sued over the suggestion that she had made it up. At first glance, Constance Briscoe portrays herself as a simple victim. But actually she's much tougher than that.

Right from the time she took her stepfather to court, she has been a victim who fights back. How important is revenge? To be proved right? Publicly to humiliate those who she feels have wronged her?

Very important, she says - "Especially if they're implying you're a liar and a fantasist. As a lawyer, you cannot have someone say that of you.

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3. Tillich (Abingdon Pillars of Theology).

Briscoe has no intention of retiring from the bar, despite her burgeoning career as an author. She sees the careers advancing happily on twin tracks. All concern different people and are in fact, set in very different places and even climates. All five are united, however, as studies of characters who are not in their native countries, of alienation, of racial tension and of sudden unpredictable shifts in power. The Tramp At Piraeus is the literary equivalent of a maestro flexing his fingers, testing his theme with a few chords and melody lines before plunging into the main piece. One of the most exquisitely painful short pieces I have read for a long time, tense and tragic, with no word out of place and no word superfluous, it actually promises more than the rest of the book can deliver.

The final squib is equally discomfiting, but featuring as it does some stereotypically chic and heartless Italians and indistinguishable Chinese characters, it leaves something of a sour aftertaste. Interestingly, although the writer has recently suggested he has no literary influences , at the time of writing he was happy to acknowledge a debt to Ibsen. There are some superb set pieces particularly an uncomfortable night in a hotel run by a colonel who bullies and rages at his native staff, but knows they will soon kill him.

As the drive becomes a race against time and impending civil war, the tension is ratcheted up with accomplished skill. It seems churlish then to complain about such a fine piece of writing.

But I did have some grumbles. Bobby, the male half of the dysfunctional lead duo, is something of a gay caricature. Whether this is the right work for the award, however, is another question To be followed soon by the astonishing Booker winner, G. The main chunk of the book, In A Free State, meanwhile, is a flawed masterpiece.