It will be “quite a wrench, the end of an era”, he says, when 20 Lucretia St, Longueville, goes under the hammer on April 14 for an expected $3.3 to $3.6 million.

It’s where he studied in his final year at Epping Boys High School; it’s where he crammed for exams at Sydney University law school before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, leading him on a path to London’s Old Bailey and fame as an international jurist.

It’s where he planned his popular TV-series Hypotheticals in the 1980s and ’90s on visits home to see his parents; it’s where his “white-faced” father told him of president John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, standing in the laundry as it happened. It’s where ABC radio informed him, as he wrote an essay on the desk in his room, of the drowning of a “very important frogman” in 1967 — “they couldn’t bring themselves to say it was prime minister Harold Holt until two hours later”.

“I have always regarded that Longueville house as home,” he said, no matter where legal cases took him — far and wide, considering he founded and still jointly runs London’s Doughty St Chambers, the largest human rights law practice in Europe with more than 100 barristers, 35 silks and 50 staff.

He remembers idyllic days playing in tournaments at Longueville Tennis Club, swimming in the tidal pool at Woodford Bay and catching the local ferry to uni. The only sounds to disturb his studies were “a flash of lorikeets in the evening and a tinkle of masts in the bay”.

He didn’t know it back then but his home would be featured one day in a movie, Ten Things I Hate About You, and quite a few of his neighbours would achieve global recognition, too.

Tennis champ John Newcombe lived around the corner, actor Nicole Kidman was born up the road, artist Brett Whiteley lived next door at one point, and he would catch the bus with future New York Times China correspondent Jane Perlez.

“Years later in the Whiteley garage they found drawings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck he had done as a child. They were sold for a great price,” he said.

“I used to go to parties organised by John Newcombe’s sister.

“Nicole I have met over the years. I was at a party with her on the harbour one New Year’s Eve when she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me. I saw stars for a moment then I realised it was midnight and the harbour was erupting.”

Was there something in the Longueville water? “We were ambitious middle-class achievers, I guess. It was a good place to concentrate on whatever you wanted to do.”

He once attended a party thrown by Kidman, taking a glass of champagne “proffered by a small chap whom I assumed was a hired waiter; I just did not recognise Tom Cruise”.

It’s a tale he recounts in his newly-published autobiography Rather His Own Man, which he has just been promoting in Sydney.

The debonair QC has represented clients ranging from writer Salman Rushdie and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to boxer Mike Tyson.

He has appeared as leading counsel in more than 200 cases, many in the European Court of Human Rights, the House of Lords, the Court of Appeal, the High Court, the Privy Council and appeal courts around the world.

He says he is about to advise the former president of Brazil, who is having “a torrid time”.

Hypotheticals fans will be pleased to learn he will be back in Sydney in September to record an edition on artificial intelligence, featuring a robot which is “being groomed to answer my questions”.

He and his wife of 27 years, author Kathy Lette, split last year on amicable terms.

Their autistic son Julius, 27, is an actor starring in the BBC medical drama Holby City — “when we’re out together he’s the one who gets stopped and asked questions” — and daughter Georgie, 25, is in politics, having won preselection for a safe Labour council seat in London’s Kings Cross.

The 71-year-old dual Australian-British citizen shows few signs of slowing down, let alone retiring, though says he sometimes has to remind himself of the motto on the coffee cup of his friend and mentor, Rumpole Of The Bailey creator John Mortimer:

“Old lawyers never die; they just lose their appeal.”

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