Background
Priestley, John Boynton was born on September 13, 1894 in Bradford, England.
(A sparkling BBC Radio 4 adaptation of J.B. Priestley's co...)
A sparkling BBC Radio 4 adaptation of J.B. Priestley's comic play, starring Alan Bennett, Brenda Blethyn, Gwen Taylor, Alun Armstrong, Michael Jayston and Nicola Pagett. Three eminently respectable Yorkshire couples are in the midst of their joint silver wedding celebrations when they receive a rude shock - they are not legally married. Confronted with this revelation, the couples face a host of personal dilemmas - not to mention the fear of the public scandal that would ensue if the news were to get out. Hovering closely over the proceedings is the Yorkshire Argus' alcohol-soaked photographer, keen to record the evening's events for posterity, and a wickedly destructive housekeeper who is hoping to use the couples' mortification to her own advantage...Elizabeth Spriggs and Polly James are also amongst the cast in this BBC Radio 4 production from 1994.The 'Classic Radio Theatre' range presents notable radio productions of much-loved plays by some of the most renowned playwrights, and starring some of our finest actors.
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(Previously published as Time and the Conways and Other Pl...)
Previously published as Time and the Conways and Other Plays, J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls and Other Plays collects four groundbreaking works by a master playwright in Penguin Modern Classics. An Inspector Calls, written at a time when society was undergoing sweeping transformations, has been produced as a successful film, and enjoyed repeated revivals since it was first produced in 1946. While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values. Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley's 'time' plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war. John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) was born in Bradford, the son of a schoolmaster. On receiving an ex-officers' grant after the First World War, Priestley went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1922, after refusing several academic posts, he went to London, where he soon established a reputation as an essayist and critic. With his third and fourth novels, The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930), he found great success and established an international reputation. This was enlarged by the plays he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, notably Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937) and An Inspector Calls (1945), which have been translated and produced all over the world. If you enjoyed An Inspector Calls, you might like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Priestley was volcanic, fertile ...[and] never dull' Anthony Burgess, Observer
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(The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and ...)
The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. In this play an inspector interrupts a party to investigate a girl's suicide, and implicates each of the party-makers in her death.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822205726/?tag=2022091-20
("This is a story in Mr. Priestley's best vein, and he use...)
"This is a story in Mr. Priestley's best vein, and he uses all the arts of suspense, all the twists and turns of fate, as well as his own cheerful and kindly reading of the human heart to make it so. It is really true that you cannot put the book down till you finish it, and you do that with a sigh." - The Observer "[T]he most completely unified novel that Mr. Priestley has written . . . an exciting tale for holiday reading. The novel is, in short, something like a masterpiece ... would do credit to any novelist." - Manchester Guardian "Mr. Priestley is in lighter and more fanciful mood in this new novel of his ... He has pleasant little excitements to offer and some sufficiently entertaining passages of dialogue ... an interesting Wellsian fantasy ... a smooth and pleasant mixture of sentiment and thrills." - Times Literary Supplement "Grand melodrama and mystery ... [a] fast-paced adventure story.... It's a well conceived tale, exceptionally well told - and makes first rate vacation reading." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[D]esigned to raise our hair ... piling menace on suspense, and desolation on both, and letting us hear the brilliant minutes tick away in Californian light. For this is a horror story - with a difference.... a very wild story ... love, horror, death, and escape." - The Spectator "Wicked and bizarre ... communicates the author's excitement to the reader." - Saturday Review "No one who likes Priestley will be disappointed or disillusioned by this book." - New York Times Three strangers, each on a separate mission, converge in the California desert. Jimmy Edlin is hot on the trail of a religious cult he believes is responsible for his brother's murder; George Hooker is a physicist in search of a missing colleague; and Malcolm Darbyshire is an Englishman looking for a beautiful heiress who has vanished without a trace. When the three men come together and discover that their situations are intertwined, they join forces to try to unravel these mysteries. Braving danger and death at every turn, they follow a trail of clues that leads to an explosive conclusion, as they uncover a sinister group whose insane philosophy calls for the destruction of all life on earth and who possess the awesome power to bring about doomsday! Written against the backdrop of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and with the threat of the Second World War looming, The Doomsday Men (1938) is one of J.B. Priestley's most thrilling novels and a story with frightening implications. This edition, the first in over fifty years, features a new introduction by Jonathan Barnes and a reproduction of the original jacket art.
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(Man and Time: A Personal Essay Exploring the Eternal Ridd...)
Man and Time: A Personal Essay Exploring the Eternal Riddle, the Theories, the Philosophy, the Scientific Discoveries and the Everyday [J. B. Priestley] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
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(75 years on from the publication of this classic Priestle...)
75 years on from the publication of this classic Priestley travelogue, its text has particular resonance in these modern times. In 1934, JB Priestley published an account of his journey through England from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen in literature of its kind, he influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for change that led to the formation of the welfare state. Prophetic, profound, humorous and as relevant today as it was 75 years ago, "English Journey" expresses Priestley's deep love of his native country and teaches us much about the human condition and the nature of Englishness. This fully illustrated special anniversary edition of one of Priestley's most enduring and widely-read works comes with a first word from Nina Bawden, forewords by Tom Priestley and Roy Hattersley; an exploration of the book's social, political and literary legacy; and personal contributions from Margaret Drabble, Alan Plater, William Woodruff, Dame Beryl Bainbridge, Lemn Sissay and Professor John Baxendale.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140042741/?tag=2022091-20
anchor novelist playwright writer
Priestley, John Boynton was born on September 13, 1894 in Bradford, England.
He left school at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.
Priestley served during the First World War in the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was wounded in 1916 by mortar fire. In his autobiography, Margin Released he is fiercely critical of the British Army and in particular the senior officer class.
After his military service Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. By the age of 30 he had established a reputation as an essayist and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel has been published under the film's name in the United States.
Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement (1930), further established him as a successful novelist. However, some critics were less than complimentary about his work, and Priestley began legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).
In 1934 he published the travelogue English Journey, which is an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the autumn of the previous year.
He moved into a new genre and became equally well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner was the first of a series of plays that enthralled West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1945), later made into a film starring Alastair Sim released in 1954. His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937).
Many of his works have a socialist aspect. For example, An Inspector Calls, as well as being one of Priestley's "Time Plays", contains many references to socialism — the inspector was arguably an alter ego through which Priestley could express his views. Priestley’s ‘Inspector Calls’ appears to simply tell the story of a young girl called Eva Smith and her tragic suicide. However, in reality it is much more than that. It 'hits you over the head' with his views on socialism'.
During World War II, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript, broadcast on Sunday night through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled. It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, Priestley's son has recently revealed in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.
Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee, and in 1942 he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and his hopes of a new and different England after the war influenced the politics of the period and helped the Labour Party gain its landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Priestley himself, however, was distrustful of the state and dogma.
Priestley's name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be inappropriate to write for the IRD.
He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.
In 1960, Priestley published Literature and Western Man, a 500-page survey of Western literature in all its genres, including Russia and the United States but excluding Asia, from the second half of the 15th century to the present (the last author discussed is Thomas Wolfe).
Although Priestley never wrote a formal book of memoirs, his literary reminiscences, Margin Released (1962), provide valuable insights into his work. The section dealing with his job as a teenage clerk in a Bradford wool-sorter's office manages to weave fine literature from an outwardly unpromising subject — a characteristic of many of his novels.
His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time (Aldus published this as a companion to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols). In this book he explored in depth various theories and beliefs about time as well as his own research and unique conclusions, including an analysis of the phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, based in part on a broad sampling of experiences gathered from the British public, who responded enthusiastically to a televised appeal he made while being interviewed in 1963 on the BBC programme, Monitor.
Priestley was one of the interviewees for the documentary series The World at War (1973), in the episode "Alone: May 1940 – May 1941". He declined lesser honours before accepting the Order of Merit in 1977.
(Man and Time: A Personal Essay Exploring the Eternal Ridd...)
(75 years on from the publication of this classic Priestle...)
(The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and ...)
(Previously published as Time and the Conways and Other Pl...)
(A sparkling BBC Radio 4 adaptation of J.B. Priestley's co...)
(Published in 1929 and J.B. Priestley's first major intern...)
("This is a story in Mr. Priestley's best vein, and he use...)
Socialism
Order of Merit
1977
delegate to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conferences
Priestley had a deep love of classical music, and in 1941 he played an important part in organising and supporting a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was struggling to establish itself as a self-governing body after the withdrawal of Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1949 the opera The Olympians by Arthur Bliss, to a libretto by Priestley, was premiered.