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“... 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 ...”

“... the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a Northamptonshire head teacher and set up on his own account as a publisher-cum-writer’? There is even a particular literary quality about the way Taylor styles himself. The Victorians did not generally call themselves by the initials of their first two ...”

“... as a resting actor, he was serving in Harrods, and he formed the impression that she was J.B. Priestley. It is important to emphasise the ‘impersonation’ aspect, for Jacob’s attitude bore no resemblance to that of her friend Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness and addicted to soulful Edward Carpenter-like theories about ‘a man trapped ...”

“... advent of true feminism, but it seems that she suffered at the hands of men. It becomes Polly’s job to seek out those men (and some women), interview them, discover just how Lorin suffered, and why. Gallery dealers, fellow painters, school friends, college friends, relatives and former in-laws – all are interviewed. Alison Lurie provides transcripts of ...”

“... a hit-or-miss procedure. It is just about possible, perhaps, to see in Johnny Bull an embryo J.B. Priestley, or to take Skinner for the youthful Oswald Mosley: but there are no grounds at all for attributing a poetic sensibility to the brashest boy in the Fourth Remove – Richards’s bony American Fish. Richards himself, on one occasion, envisaging his ...”

“... and above all at his scholarly best, he certainly isn’t. The obvious comparison here is J.B. Priestley, another figure who had great success as a wartime broadcaster. Unalike in so many ways, they both communicated a deep reassuringness, a feeling that the travails of common experience were familiar to them yet also ultimately surmountable – a ...”

“... and he was going to accept the challenge of the Sunday Times. In order to kill Tony Howard’s new job he forbade any of us to speak to him. Uncharacteristically, Crossman did not follow this entry with any comment or aside, and the remainder of the six-year narrative does not include any ‘off the record’ meetings with his friend, whose ...”

“... the Royal Literary Fund and the ICA. And there were the writers: the Themersons courted J.B. Priestley but he failed to deliver; Edwin Morgan had his poetry rejected; Italo Calvino called in on the couple; B.S. Johnson invited Stefan to the Writers’ Co-Operative. The correspondence file bulges in surprising places, in large part thanks to Stefan’s ...”

“... His invention of the self-referential as a theatrical technique led on to the time plays of J.B. Priestley, in which the mechanics are even more obviously the message. But Coward also anticipates those playwrights who stretched the form to snapping point, and in doing so created a new dramatic genre. Coward thought Waiting for Godot ridiculous, but a man who ...”

“... certain literary pedigree. A month after Huxley’s arrival in 1937, P.G. Wodehouse left, but J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole and Anthony Powell were all hawking their wares with varying degrees of success (Powell was hindered by the fact that his agent had dropped dead on Hollywood Boulevard a few days before his visit). Unlike Huxley, these other English ...”

“... to organise large rallies but to enlist writers, artists and musicians (Auden, Jack Lindsay, J.B. Priestley and Paul Robeson among them). Some of the cultural delegates in 1954 had been involved in these events as young men, and most of them had read Edgar Snow’s hugely influential – and partisan – Red Star over China, published by the Left Book Club in ...”

“... on 15 July 1936, we may safely bet that this play was, as Peterley reveals, co-authored by J.B. Priestley under the pseudonym Peter Goldsmith. Richard Pennington’s slip here, by failing as editor to move Peterley’s diary from June to July, is almost an invitation to the critic to misunderstand his methods. For in terms of such events we are reading an ...”

“... was an invasion from the Continent. Despite formal experimentation in unexpected places (J.B. Priestley’s time-plays anticipate Caryl Churchill; Noel Coward’s 1930 antiwar play Postmortem takes place in the closing seconds of a man’s life), mid-20th-century British theatre was as resistant to the high avant-garde as it was disdainful of the lower ...”

“... name for good. And yet his novels have survived, thanks to the efforts of such admirers as J.B. Priestley, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, and to the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s ...”

“... atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham. It is these antecedents which bring out the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not ...”