Private Passions

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow University to read English and becoming a teacher, as they expected, she startled everyone by travelling to London - to study for the Bar. Some of her friends misunderstood and thought she’d gone south to find bar work. This was the end of the sixties, a time when there were extremely few women barristers. Since then, her ambition, fierce intelligence and considerable charm have taken her right to the top, and she now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws. She created a huge stir when she published her first book, Eve was Framed, in 1992 – a shocking examination of how the criminal justice system fails women. Three years ago, she felt so little had changed that she published a sequel – in a book with the title Misjustice. Helen Kennedy campaigns now too on wider human rights issues, such as the persecuti