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“... Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ ‘Regarding narrative,’ J.B. Priestley declared, ‘every novel that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around. He gets lost. Even when going straight he often goes too ...”

“... since his version of the common culture of the Thirties and Forties has as its figurehead J.B. Priestley. Priestley, the subject of his final chapter, is presented as a demotic ‘man for all media’, straddling the commercial and élite cultures of his time. Against him are ranged the dissenting voices of the Marxist ...”

“... complicating the easy stereotypes of Bloomsbury’s revolt against Victorianism. In some ways J.B. Priestley fits less well, partly because of a quite different class background and correspondingly less mandarin manner, but even so there are numerous links between his pipesmoking-and-good-fellowship vision of England and the social attitudes displayed by the ...”

“... and Hollywood: there is another called ‘Apprentice and Journeyman’, describing his small jobs under large artists – strong, liberal directors of his own Top Sergeant rank. But it is a ‘Life and Times’, primarily, in its terse references to the audience’s state of mind in particular periods, the relation of his movies to ‘public ...”

“... either: Orwell thought them irrelevant to his quest for a manly English socialism, and if J.B. Priestley was struck by the number of factory girls dressed like duchesses when he toured the Midlands in 1933, he didn’t feel the need to talk to them. Girls weren’t as disorderly or troublesome as boys, so officials didn’t much bother with them; and since ...”

“... become the predominant idea of Brandt that he was the photographic equivalent of Orwell or J.B. Priestley. Delany successfully shows this reading to be inaccurate, and one of the virtues of his account is the way it traces the evolution of Brandt’s photography as it passes through the various genres, seeing them as experimental stages in the development ...”

“... but his record of opposition to Fascism and Stalinism is a perfectly honourable one, and J.B. Priestley was not exaggerating when he said in a funeral oration that the ‘prophet of this age of transition’ was mourned by men and women of all races. Yet to Michael Coren (who, to do him justice, quotes Priestley in ...”

“... on the sterling old tradition of the heart being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of writing. Both novels ...”

“... less by the novelist than by the purely talkative writer – Lamb, Hazlitt, Meredith, J.B. Priestley. Amis has something in common with all of them, and his conversational powers, transposed into the verbal clatter of the typewriter, are as formidable as theirs were as men of the pen. The hero of Take a girl like you was always more than prepared to ...”

“... Mr Gil Thompson, Chief Executive of Manchester Airport, cited James Agate, Asa Briggs and J.B. Priestley on the splendours of Manchester’s cultural past. Mr Thompson didn’t quote Engels. Nor, understandably, John Ruskin: ‘Manchester can produce no good art, and no good culture.’ Despite the presence at the press conference of John Thaw (alias ...”

“... since the Edwardian period meant that by the 1930s the typical 16-year-old boy applying for a job with the Post Office was 16 lbs heavier and one and a half inches taller than he had been a quarter-century earlier. And far from shying away from outdoor pursuits, boys and girls were enjoying unprecedented access to the countryside. The expansion of rural ...”

“... Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedrooms at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in all the bedrooms,’ drawls Tristram. ‘Then it would be a best-seller.’ Take the second draft of the filmscript of The Madness ...”

“... Ambition is much more easily disparaged when one is securely placed for life in a comfortable job and town. How would England appear to Allison if he had been born ten years later and looked for a job when they were already taken? Economic change and growth are more important for the young than for the ...”

“... Despite a quotation from Vile Bodies and references to Graham Greene, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, this section is a testament to the inadequacy of written sources, on their own, when researching matters as elusive as the likely ambience in which radio programmes were heard. At one extreme, Scannell and Cardiff reproduce comic exhortations from the ...”

“... in her even-handedness, for a supporter of the witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, she wrote to J.B. Priestley: ‘I have never written or spoken a single word in defence of McCarthy ... Can you suggest why ... I should suddenly fall for a half-baked gorilla from the Middle West?’ Did that mean, she asked, that she could never mention Communist infiltration ...”