The ultimate man of letters

This comprehensive biography of the ultimate man of letters - novelist, playwright, screenwriter, biographer, essayist and critic - seems like a breath from another age. Though he only died in 1984, Priestley belongs to an England that is gone forever, and Judith Cook records it in scrupulously detailed prose as she follows the immensely creative and emotionally stormy journey that was Priestley's life. Not everybody liked him then - Ogden Nash is supposed to have coined the line "Mr J.B. Priestley is simply beastly" - and hardly anybody reads him now, but this study may well encourage a new generation of readers to investigate the Priestley oeuvre.