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“... called the Kondratieff Laureates. Fifty years ago, when the economic cycle last hit bottom, J.B. Priestley made his English Journey. A few years later Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, and Edwin Muir Scottish Journey. Now, as the succeeding wave reaches the bottom of its downward swing, the BBC send out Bainbridge to follow ...”

“... something that can’t simply be inferred from looking out of the car window. Bournville, J.B. Priestley declared after his visit there in 1933, ‘is one of the small outposts of civilisation, still ringed round with barbarism’. Taken in isolation, the remark is superior and windily apocalyptic. But isn’t that true of much ‘Condition of ...”

“... It was once observed by J.B. Priestley that the literary life in England was ‘a rat-race without even a sight of the other rats’. English authors on the whole prefer to work on their own and find their friends outside the confraternity – indeed, because of this preference, there is hardly such a thing as a confraternity ...”

“... and vanity: ‘I’m bursting with pride, which is why I have no vanity.’ A performer’s job is to be sensational; and in his songs, plays and public performances, Coward lived up to the responsibility of making a proper spectacle of himself. His peers had difficulty in fathoming this phenomenon. T.E. Lawrence thought Coward had ‘a hasty kind of ...”

“... it turns out, were as boring – and as little about the future – as anyone else’s). J.B. Priestley made a more public show of it: in 1963 he made a programme about Dunne for the BBC’s Monitor, and solicited listeners for their own experiences; he and his secretary carefully sifted through the hundreds of responses to sort the loonies from the ...”

“... In a late story by J.B. Priestley, ‘Underground’, an adulterer bent on escape to voluptuous Brazil boards the Northern Line. At Hampstead everyone else exits; but at the next station, a Golders Green of the imagination, dead souls crowd in and the train trundles him away to the underworld. In A Word Child, surely the best of Iris Murdoch’s non-magical novels, a civil servant racked with remorse cruises for solace round and round the Circle Line, stopping only for refreshment at the platform bars of Sloane Square and Liverpool Street – both, alas, now no more ...”

“... would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brideshead Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American ...”

“... time. As a talks producer at the BBC, working in the Indian section of the Eastern Service, his job was to show Britain’s intentions towards its proudest imperial possession in the kindest of lights. India’s growing demand for independence made it a focus of Axis propaganda: why should Indians die for the nation that denied their political freedom? In ...”

“... seems kooky now, but H.G. Wells took an interest, and so did the Tolkien/Lewis Inklings, and J.B. Priestley, among others. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer and former soldier, and part of the appeal of his book was probably that he dressed his speculations with the correct amount of scientific apparatus. It is also evident from reading him that he believed ...”

“... philosopher. His style was zestful, easy and lucid, free from tags and tired allusions. J.B. Priestley, who edited The Bodley Head Leacock (1957), claimed that, at his best, the Professor, by steering between the ‘amiable nonsense’ of English humour and the ‘hard-cutting wit and almost vindictive satire’ of America, was able to express an ...”

“... life, of ourselves to ourselves and to others. Everyone knows that jolly Jack Lewis and jolly Jack Priestley were not jolly at all inside, but there is a perennial pleasure in finding out what they did, what they liked and felt, and thus, in some degree, who they are. I doubt they would have got on together. Their loudnesses were not compatible. And both were ...”

“... he had been allowed to join the local Hitler Youth.) As a student at LSE, then in a variety of jobs he didn’t suit, finally in the Army – where he got on famously – he had a number of love affairs. Ferris enterprisingly tracked down two or three of the ladies and is fairly discreet about what he learned: Huw couldn’t reconcile love with lust; the ...”

“... national conscience needs nudging, an episode of Cracker, or even a Guardian editorial, does the job rather more efficiently than any number of marvellous J.B. Priestley revivals. As a schoolboy, Tynan once wrote to Julian Holland, urging his friend to ‘worry about words’ and quoting the French Symbolist writer, Remy ...”

“... of The Trap when he cuts to a clip from the 1964 series Conversations for Tomorrow, in which J.B. Priestley sits smoking a cigar and reaching for the port while Isaiah Berlin and A.J. Ayer discuss concepts of liberty. Curtis stays with Berlin for an unusually long time, perhaps as relieved as we are to have a talking head worth listening to, especially one so ...”

“... or patronage. Whatever social message or indignation may be implicit, of the kind his friend J.B. Priestley was putting into Angel Pavement at about the same time, they are ignored both by the way the story is told and the kind of impression it makes. What with his success in the theatre and the suc·cès d'es·time of his novels the ball at this point of the ...”