Priestley

This is a comprehensive biography of J.B. Priestley which has been written with the co-operation of the Priestley children and, in the 18 months before her death, of his widow, Jacquetta Hawkes. Jack Priestley was a true polymath: a successful and prolific novelist, playwright, screenwriter, biographer, critic and essayist, and a major social and political commentator, who could switch between the various disciplines with apparent ease. Born in what he considered to be a golden age - the end of the Victorian era - Priestley's life spanned almost a century, ending during the decade of Thatcherism. The son of a socialist schoolteacher father, he was inevitably influenced by the four years he spent in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I, and became an outspoken critic of the times in which he lived. "English Journey" is his journal of his travels round the country in the depths of the 1930s Depresssion.
His interest in politics continued throughout his life (he was a founder-member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), and probably the most commonly remembered image of him, suspended in time by his famous broadcasts during World War II, is of the bluff, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman - Jolly Jack Priestley. However, behind the exterior of a straightforward, uncomplicated extrovert was someone a great deal more serious and complex. Access to numerous letters and documents has enabled Judith Cook to record Priestley's private life, as well as his public persona. She examines the relationships he had with his three wives and many mistresses, who included Jane Wyndham Lewis and Peggy Ashcroft, and with his children; and his friendships with writers, politicians and actors, including H.G. Wells, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and Gracie Fields. Judith Cook is the author of "Daphne - A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier", "The Slicing Edge" and "Unlawful Killing: The Murder of Hilda Murrell".