Lord and former top judge tells of career and memories as book released

And he has handed down groundbreaking judgments which have helped shape the modern legal landscape.

In courtroom action he has observed at close quarters the likes of Arthur Scargill, Robert Maxwell, and Harriet Harman.

Now aged 83, he has written a memoir called Playing Off The Roof & Other Stories. A passionate golfer, the title is a reference to a headline-creating incident when, after his golfing partner had played an errant shot which landed on the roof of the clubhouse, Lord Brown went up a ladder and chipped the ball onto the green below.

He became a Law Lord in January 2004, and took his title Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood from the parish near Church Stretton, although his choice was initially rejected by the Garter King of Arms, who said it "wasn't in his gazetteer."

"Starting to get desperate, however, I suggested he might care to telephone South Shropshire District Council. This, somewhat grudgingly, he then did, happily with success," writes Lord Brown.

"Only after the decision was taken was I able to check with a local friend in Shropshire whether he thought the few inhabitants of Eaton-under-Heywood would actually object to my commandeering the name. He replied that he thought it unlikely any of them would ever hear of it but, if they did, they would probably not mind."

The Shropshire connection is through his wife of 56 years, Jenny, from the Buddicom family of Ticklerton, whom he first met at Oxford. The couple have a cottage in the county where they come to unwind, and Lord Brown plays golf at Church Stretton's course high on the Long Mynd (although the rooftop incident was at another club).

Lord Brown's long and distinguished career has included being a High Court judge, the Treasury Devil – the colloquial name for the First Junior Treasury Counsel, acting for every government department except the Inland Revenue – and president of a tribunal set up to investigate complaints made against the intelligence services and GCHQ, in which he found that literally 99 per cent of complaints were nonsensical.

"Paranoia is surprisingly widespread," he writes.

He says his 11 years at the Court of Appeal were among the happiest and most fulfilling, with much interesting and challenging judicial review work.

As one of the Law Lords he was involved in sitting in judgment on issues of the greatest importance and public interest, and he then sat on the new Supreme Court, which took over from the House of Lords as the final court of appeal.

One of the last appeals he heard before retiring was Julian Assange's failed challenge in 2012 to the order for his extradition to Sweden to face trial there for alleged sex offences. When the judgment was given, Lord Brown had already spent over a month in a London clinic where he was treated for bowel cancer.

Lord Brown, who now sits in the House of Lords as a working crossbench peer, reflects that seldom have his judgements attracted public attention, but an exception was the reaction to his opening line in one judgment in what was commonly known as the Gays In The Military Case in 1995.

Although he rejected the challenge to the UK's then policy of dismissing homosexuals from the armed services, he said he suspected its days were numbered, and his judgment began: "Lawrence of Arabia would not be welcome in today's armed forces."

He says he received more than 100 letters.

"They were about evenly divided between those who said 'How dare you traduce the memory of a great servant of the British Empire; there is not a word of reliable evidence to establish that Lawrence was a homosexual.' The other half said 'Too true, Lawrence wouldn't be welcome in today's armed services – we don't want poofters like him around.'"

Perhaps of interest to residents of Wednesbury, the book also makes mention of the "Wednesbury irrationality test," also known as "Wednesbury unreasonableness."

It turns out that it is a seminal case in the field of public and administrative law, the effect being that courts won't quash an administrative decision of a public authority on grounds of irrationally unless the decision is so plainly bonkers that nobody could have sensibly arrived at it.

The principle arises from a legal challenge by a cinema chain to a ruling by Wednesbury Corporation in the late 1940s that it could only open a cinema if children were banned from it on Sundays.

Playing Off The Roof & Other Stories costs £20 and is available from Amazon.