(Were there peanuts in pubs in 1917, and wire coat-hangers in wardrobes in 1942? Write to the Extremely Pedantic Old Codgers column, care of this newspaper.)Trouble came just after East Croydon on the 20.50 from Brighton to Victoria last Wednesday. I can just about forgive the 1950s steam locomotive in Ian McKellen's 1930s version of Richard III, and the corrugated-iron roof in Tony Richardson's otherwise 1700s version of Tom Jones. But I had great difficulty overcoming a dubious reference to some pub-bought peanuts in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration which is set in 1917. What were the sirens of Dad's Army and the Second World War doing among the mead and the bogs?A small thing, but it snapped the thread that was suspending my disbelief. Anachronisms always have that effect on me (perhaps they shouldn't but they do). Characters called Cathal and Padric jostle other characters called Bega and Ecfrith. It is not, I can safely say, a comic or experimental piece of fiction.

Bragg's book is set entirely in the England and Ireland of the 7th century. A few paragraphs previously, this complaint had been explored in details that we needn't bother with here, and I was thinking how brave Melv had been to tackle head-on an area of the human condition usually only glanced at by literature (eg "his bowels turned to liquid") But the phrase "the all clear" broke my admiring reverie. What is needed is more of them, not fewer; a bigger cake, that can be better shared, is how he puts it.. I was jogging along nicely through the opening of Melvyn Bragg's new novel, Credo, when I was stopped by the following sentence: A dry, trumpeting eruption signalled the all clear in his anus but still he squatted, superstitiously convinced that exposure to the freezing air might act as a natural stopper... What is being described is a fictional Irish king, Cathal, and his troublesome diarrhoea.

He has acted for striking miners and has even appeared for Militant.But, Scrivener is a barrister first and last. The culture promised by a Blair government represents the politics that the middle-ground Scrivener has always aspired to. He applies the same pragmatic attitude to that as he does to law "What is wrong with being a millionaire?" he would ask. Ken Livingstone, the left-wing MP, former GLC leader, and perhaps an acid test, had the misfortune of having Scrivener against him twice - but still instructed him once himself. But if appearing for Dame Shirley and Asil Nadir upsets some political sensibilities it should be remembered that he has also acted both for and against surcharged Labour councillors. A number of barristers are adept at circumventing the rule: by pleading "non-availability", for example, or having a discreet chat with their clerks.

But Scrivener does not avoid legal aid cases, which earn barristers perhaps a quarter of the fees of privately paying cases.Whether legal aid is too low and private fees too high is another story - but Scrivener's standard of living has yet to be dented by the efforts of some chambers to urge clients to "shop around". "But I find it difficult to understand how he comes to be defending in cases like Shirley Porter's." It is certainly true that he attacked John Magill, the Westminster council district auditor, with all the relish and gusto one has come to expect. Scrivener responds to that kind of criticism by invoking the so-called "cab rank" rule that stops appropriately qualified barristers turning down cases they don't like the look of. It is in this politically delicate territory that he and some of the Bar's radicals part company."He was one of the few chairmen of the Bar to have given the Bar some sort of profile and standing with the public, dragging it out of its introverted, navel-studying, insular and conservative ways, and giving it a public face," says one.