An Inspector Calls: the message behind the new BBC thriller - Telegraph TV and Radio An Inspector Calls: the message behind the new BBC thriller As Priestley’s An Inspector Calls comes to BBC One, Tim Martin examines the biting message behind its cosy whodunnit façade David Thewlis as the Inspector and Finn Cole as Eric Birling in the BBC's upcoming 'An Inspector Calls' Photo: BBC Pictures/Drama Repbulic By Tim Martin 11:00AM BST 12 Sep 2015 ‘The way some of these cranks talk now, you’d think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up like bees in a hive. Community and all that nonsense.” The lines belong to Arthur Birling, the wealthy industrialist celebrating with his family as the curtain rises on JB Priestley ’s An Inspector Calls, but the uncharitable sentiments obviously aren’t confined either to 1912, the year in which Priestley’s play is set, or to 1947, the year of its UK premiere (it first opened in Russia 70 years ago).

Instead, this strange and didactic piece of theatre has lasted longer than anything else its author wrote, and its story about the moral audit of an upper-crust family continues to appeal to audiences well beyond those for whom it was originally conceived. Besides the 1954 film with Alastair Sim and a clutch of periodic revivals on TV, An Inspector Calls has also been a Soviet-era Russian mini-series (Inspektor Gull, 1979), a madcap cinematic comedy set among the nouveau riche of Hong Kong (released in February) and, as of last year, has taken its place on the GCSE syllabus. Now it returns to the BBC in a new adaptation directed by Aisling Walsh, with David Thewlis as the mysterious Inspector Goole who turns the lives of the Birling family upside down. In one sense, the appeal of An Inspector Calls is easy to understand.

Set before the First World War but written and performed at the end of the Second, it came packaged from birth with a kind of comforting period remoteness, and its presentation is that of a classic drawing-room thriller in the Agatha Christie mould: as the Birlings are celebrating their daughter’s engagement over dinner, a policeman arrives to speak to them about the suicide, earlier in the day, of a pregnant woman. Every member of the family denies any connection with the victim, but, as the evening wears on, it becomes apparent that they have, knowingly or blindly, played a role in her downfall. The wealthy paterfamilias sacked her from his factory after a labour dispute, the daughter arranged to have her dismissed from a position as a shop assistant, and so on. Under the scrutiny of the appallingly candid Goole, whose performer Priestley insisted should “create an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness”, the mystery of her death is slowly solved. If the conceit of An Inspector Calls is familiar, though, the execution is more unusual.

Priestley began writing plays in the early Thirties, after a successful career as a novelist and essayist: his book The Good Companions (1929) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, became a bestseller, and largely freed Priestley from financial worries thereafter. Miranda Richardson as Sybil Birling, An Inspector Calls (Photo: BBC Pictures/Drama Republic) Writing for the stage offered him the opportunity to experiment – and, particularly, to experiment with the dramatic possibilities of several then-fashionable theories of time. The first of these plays was Dangerous Corner (1932), in which a houseful of couples suffer an evening of brutally traumatic revelations before the play resets to the beginning and events take a different path. By the time of An Inspector Calls, Priestley was fully at ease with a mystical dimension in his work that led the psychologist Carl Jung, a frequent correspondent, to praise his “superhuman faculty of looking at things with a straight and an inverted eye”.

Not only does the play make use of one of his signature timeslips – as with Dangerous Corner, an adjustment to the flow of events in the final moments acts as a sort of closing twist to the play – it also strongly encourages metaphysical speculation about its central figure: is the implacably knowledgeable Goole merely an impostor, or the supernatural manifestation of some higher ethical court? Naturally, opinions and stagings vary. Walsh’s production closes this loophole with a determinedly religious take on the character, but Stephen Daldry’s influential National Theatre production from 1992 (staged, like this year’s revival, after a general election that returned a Conservative government in the face of most predictions) seemed to present Goole as a manifestation of revolutionary consciousness, ferociously “inspecting” the unreflective privilege of the Birlings while a Greek chorus of voiceless masses loitered outside their house. This doesn’t seem out of line with the play’s ambitions.

The period setting and creaky detective plot serve several functions in An Inspector Calls, but one of them is surely a kind of snake-charming: because the play takes its place so unthreateningly in the theatrical tradition of the drawing-room thriller, its political aspect can be more easily dissimulated. As the action is located within the moral strictures of the detective story, it forces audiences to consider its drama of capital and social class as a sequence of decisions about personal morality. This topic was one of Priestley’s preoccupations, and, by 1947, it had already contributed heavily to the success and failure of one of his most cherished projects. Beginning in May 1940, as the Phoney War came to an end and German troops pushed into the Low Countries and France, Priestley began a sequence of Sunday-night broadcasts on the Home Service that soon made him a national figure. Called the Postscripts to the News, they were artful and thoughtful pieces of morale-boosting propaganda, in which Priestley developed the persona of “Jolly Jack Priestley”, the straight-talking, unpretentious Yorkshireman who simply told the truth about Britain as he saw it.

JB Priestley in 1941 (Photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS) “I have never pretended to be the victim of the artistic temperament, whatever that means,” began one talk. “I’m not very fond of the House of Commons – I don’t mean as a political institution, but as a place to spend an afternoon in,” began another. In his role as man of the people, Priestley rebutted Nazi propaganda as fanciful nonsense while praising the British fighting spirit, the hard work of the munitions factories, the fortitude of Britain’s politicians, and so on. “I am simply a private person giving his impression of what is happening,” he reflected in one talk. “No official tells me what to say. There are no strategy and tactics in the background, no propaganda campaign at all.” The Postscripts had an incalculable effect on British morale in the period after Dunkirk, and onward throughout the Battle of Britain and the bombing raids on London. In 1941, however, the second series of broadcasts was brought to an end by the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper.

Priestley maintained that this was because of his emphasis on socialist values in rebuilding postwar Britain , though, as the historian Siân Nicholas has shown, the real reason is likely to have had more to do with the debate in government about the role of powerful personalities in wartime broadcasting. No such strictures applied to the stage, though Priestley seems to have recognised the wisdom of complicating, if not concealing, his messages. Although the Inspector’s final speech acquires a certain dramatic irony from the play’s setting in 1912, its tone of Old Testament prophecy leaves little doubt that its author meant it for the ages. “We don’t live alone,” booms Goole before stalking from the stage. “We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.” This reads equally well as apocalyptic socialism, pacifist prophecy or imitation of Christ, and it is the cryptic motor that has powered An Inspector Calls through 70 years of changing culture. Long may it run.

An Inspector Calls is on BBC One on Sunday, Sept 13, at 9pm Top Galleries An Inspector Calls and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics): Amazon.co.uk: J. B. Priestley: 9780141185354: Books An Inspector Calls and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics) Add all three to Basket Buy the selected items together This item:An Inspector Calls and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics) by J. B. Priestley Paperback Â£6.00 In stock. Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Macbeth (Wordsworth Classics) by William Shakespeare Paperback Â£1.99 In stock. Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Wordsworth Classics) by Robert Louis Stevenson Paperback Â£1.99 In stock. Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items.

In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (29 Mar. 2001) Language: English Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description About the Author J.B. Priestley, the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in 1894. After leaving Belle Vue High School, he spent some time as a junior clerk in a wool office. (A lively account of his life at this period may be found in his volume of reminiscences, Margin Released.) He joined the army in 1914, and in 1919, on receiving an ox-officers’ grant, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

In 1922, after refusing several academic posts, and having already published one book and contributed critical articles and essays to various reviews, he went to London. There he soon made a reputation as an essayist and critic. he began writing novels, and with his third and fourth novels, The Good Companions and Angel Pavement, he scored a great success and established an international reputation. This was enlarged by the plays he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, some of these, notably Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, having been translated and produced all over the world. During the Second World War he was exceedingly popular as a broadcaster. Since the war his most important novels have been Bright Day, Festival at Farbridge, Lost Empires and The Image Men, and his more ambitious literary and social criticism can be found in Literature and Western Man, Man and Time and Journey Down a Rainbow, which he wrote with his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, a distinguished archaeologist and a well-established writer herself. It was in this last book that Priestley coined the term ‘Admass’, now in common use.

Among his latest books are Victoria’s Heydey (1972), Over the Long High Wall (1972), The English (1973), Outcries and Asides, a collection of essays (1974), A Visit to New Zealand (1974), The Carfitt Crisis (1975), Particular Pleasures (1975), Found, Lost, Found, or the English Way of Life (1976), The Happy Dream (1976), English Humour (1976) and an autobiography, Instead of the Trees (1977). In 1977 J. B. Priestley received the Order of merit. He died in 1984. What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? An Inspector Calls : J. B. Priestley : 9780141185354 Plays, Playscripts About J. B. Priestley J.B. Priestley, the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in 1894. After leaving Belle Vue High School, he spent some time as a junior clerk in a wool office.

(A lively account of his life at this period may be found in his volume of reminiscences, Margin Released.) He joined the army in 1914, and in 1919, on receiving an ox-officers' grant, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1922, after refusing several academic posts, and having already published one book and contributed critical articles and essays to various reviews, he went to London. There he soon made a reputation as an essayist and critic. he began writing novels, and with his third and fourth novels, The Good Companions and Angel Pavement, he scored a great success and established an international reputation. This was enlarged by the plays he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, some of these, notably Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, having been translated and produced all over the world. During the Second World War he was exceedingly popular as a broadcaster.

Since the war his most important novels have been Bright Day, Festival at Farbridge, Lost Empires and The Image Men, and his more ambitious literary and social criticism can be found in Literature and Western Man, Man and Time and Journey Down a Rainbow, which he wrote with his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, a distinguished archaeologist and a well-established writer herself. It was in this last book that Priestley coined the term 'Admass', now in common use. Among his latest books are Victoria's Heydey (1972), Over the Long High Wall (1972), The English (1973), Outcries and Asides, a collection of essays (1974), A Visit to New Zealand (1974), The Carfitt Crisis (1975), Particular Pleasures (1975), Found, Lost, Found, or the English Way of Life (1976), The Happy Dream (1976), English Humour (1976) and an autobiography, Instead of the Trees (1977). In 1977 J. B. Priestley received the Order of merit.

He died in 1984. show more Follow us BBC - GCSE Bitesize: J B Priestley J B Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls after the First World War and like much of his work contains controversial, politically charged messages. J B Priestley J B Priestley John Boynton Priestley was born in Yorkshire in 1894. He knew early on that he wanted to become a writer, but decided against going to university as he thought he would get a better feel for the world around him away from academia [academia: An academic community, usually a university. ]. Instead, he became a junior clerk with a local wool firm at the age of 16. When the First World War broke out, Priestley joined the infantry and only just escaped death on a number of occasions. After the war, he gained a degree from Cambridge University, then moved to London to work as a freelance writer. He wrote successful articles and essays, then published the first of many novels, The Good Companions, in 1929. He wrote his first play in 1932 and went on to write 50 more. Much of his writing was ground-breaking and controversial.

He included new ideas about possible parallel universes and strong political messages. During the Second World War he broadcast a massively popular weekly radio programme which was attacked by the Conservatives as being too left-wing. The programme was eventually cancelled by the BBC for being too critical of the Government. He continued to write into the 1970s, and died in 1984. Page: J.B. Priestley (Author of An Inspector Calls) edit data John Boynton Priestley, the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in September 1894, and after schooling he worked for a time in the local wool trade. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Priestley joined the British Army, and was sent to France --in 1915 taking part in the Battle of Loos. After being wounded in 1917 Priestley returned to England for six months; then, after going back to the Western Front he suffered the consequences of a German gas attack, and, treated at Rouen, he was declared unfit for active service and was transferred to the Entertainers Section of the British Army.

When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Sub John Boynton Priestley, the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in September 1894, and after schooling he worked for a time in the local wool trade. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Priestley joined the British Army, and was sent to France --in 1915 taking part in the Battle of Loos. After being wounded in 1917 Priestley returned to England for six months; then, after going back to the Western Front he suffered the consequences of a German gas attack, and, treated at Rouen, he was declared unfit for active service and was transferred to the Entertainers Section of the British Army. When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Subsequently he found work as theatre reviewer with the Daily News, and also contributed to the Spectator, the Challenge and Nineteenth Century.

His earliest books included The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humour (1928). His breakthrough came with the immensely popular novel The Good Companions, published in 1929, and Angel Pavement followed in 1930. He emerged, too, as a successful dramatist with such plays as Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938) and An Inspector Calls (1947). The publication of English Journey in 1934 emphasised Priestley's concern for social problems and the welfare of ordinary people. During the Second World War Priestley became a popular and influential broadcaster with his famous Postscripts that followed the nine o'clock news BBC Radio on Sunday evenings. Starting on 5th June 1940, Priestley built up such a following that after a few months it was estimated that around 40 per cent of the adult population in Britain was listening to the programme.

Some members of the Conservative Party, including Winston Churchill, expressed concern that Priestley might be expressing left-wing views on the programme, and, to his dismay, Priestley was dropped after his talk on 20th October 1940. After the war Priestley continued his writing, and his work invariably provoked thought, and his views were always expressed in his blunt Yorkshire style. His prolific output continued right up to his final years, and to the end he remained the great literary all-rounder. His favourite amiong his books was for many years the novel Bright Day, though he later said he had come to prefer The Image Men. It should not be overlooked that Priestley was an outstanding essayist, and many of his short pieces best capture his passions and his great talent and his mastery of the English language. He set a fine example for any would-be author. ...more Smashwords – Good Companions – a book by JB Priestley Tags: yorkshire j b priestey About JB Priestley John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster.

He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls (1945). His output included literary and social criticism. Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "ultra-respectable" suburb of Bradford.[1] His father was a headmaster. His mother died when he was just two years old and his father remarried four years later.[2] Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.

Priestley served during the First World War in the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was wounded in 1916 by mortar fire. In his autobiography, Margin Released he is fiercely critical of the British Army and in particular of the officer class. After his military service Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. By the age of 30 he had established a reputation as a humorous writer and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel has been published under the film's name in the United States. Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement (1930), further established him as a successful novelist. However, some critics were less than complimentary about his work, and Priestley began legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).

In 1934 he published the travelogue English Journey, which is an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the autumn of the previous year.[3] He moved into a new genre and became equally well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner was the first of a series of plays that enthralled West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1945), later made into a film starring Alastair Sim released in 1954. His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937). Many of his works have a socialist aspect. For example, An Inspector Calls, as well as being a "Time Play", contains many references to socialism — the inspector was arguably an alter ego through which Priestley could express his views.[4]Priestley’s ‘Inspector Calls’ appears to simply tell the story of a young girl called Eva Smith and her tragic suicide. However, in reality it is much more than that.

It 'hits you over the head' with his views on socialism'. During World War II, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript, broadcast on Sunday night through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled. It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, Priestley's son has recently revealed in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.[5][6] Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee, and in 1942 he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and his hopes of a new and different England after the war influenced the politics of the period and helped the Labour Party gain its landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Priestley himself, however, was distrustful of the state and dogma.

Priestley's name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be inappropriate to write for the IRD.[7] He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. In 1960, Priestley published Literature and Western Man, a 500-page survey of Western literature in all its genres, including Russia and the United States but excluding Asia, from the second half of the 15th century to the present (the last author discussed is Thomas Wolfe). Although Priestley never wrote a formal book of memoirs, his literary reminiscences, Margin Released (1962), provide valuable insights into his work. The section dealing with his job as a teenage clerk in a Bradford wool-sorter's office manages to weave fine literature from an outwardly unpromising subject — a characteristic of many of his novels.

His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time (Aldus published this as a companion to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols). In this book he explored in depth various theories and beliefs about time as well as his own research and unique conclusions, including an analysis of the phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, based in part on a broad sampling of experiences gathered from the British public, who responded enthusiastically to a televised appeal he made while being interviewed in 1963 on the BBC programme, Monitor. Priestley was one of the interviewees for the documentary series The World at War (1973), in the episode "Alone: May 1940 – May 1941". He declined lesser honours before accepting the Order of Merit in 1977. The University of Bradford awarded Priestley the title of honorary Doctor of Letters in 1970, and he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Bradford in 1973. His connections with the city were also marked by the naming of the J. B.

Priestley Library at the University of Bradford, which he officially opened in 1975,[8] and by the larger-than-life statue of him, commissioned by the Bradford City Council after his death, and which now stands in front of the National Media Museum.[9] A special collector's edition of Bright Day was re-issued by Great Northern Books in 2006, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of this novel.[10] Priestley had a deep love of classical music, and in 1941 he played an important part in organising and supporting a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was struggling to establish itself as a self-governing body after the withdrawal of Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1949 the opera The Olympians by Arthur Bliss, to a libretto by Priestley, was premiered. Priestley snubbed the chance to become a lord in 1965 and investiture as a Companion of Honour in 1969.[11] But he did become a member of the Order of Merit in 1977. He also served as a British delegate to UNESCO conferences.

He was honoured by both the Universities of Birmingham and Bradford and the city of Bradford granted him Freedom of the City in 1973. He married three times. In 1921 he married Emily "Pat" Tempest, a music-loving Bradford librarian. Two daughters were born, one in 1923 and one in 1924, but in 1925 his wife died of cancer.[12] In September 1926, he married Jane Wyndham-Lewis (ex-wife of the original 'Beachcomber' D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, no relation to the artist Wyndham Lewis); they had two daughters and one son. In 1953, he divorced his second wife and married the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, his collaborator on the play Dragon's Mouth.[6] An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley | wordery.com Would you like to add a title? Author Biography J.B. Priestley, the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in 1894. After leaving Belle Vue High School, he spent some time as a junior clerk in a wool office.

(A lively account of his life at this period may be found in his volume of reminiscences, Margin Released.) He joined the army in 1914, and in 1919, on receiving an ox-officers' grant, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1922, after refusing several academic posts, and having already published one book and contributed critical articles and essays to various reviews, he went to London. There he soon made a reputation as an essayist and critic. he began writing novels, and with his third and fourth novels, The Good Companions and Angel Pavement, he scored a great success and established an international reputation. This was enlarged by the plays he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, some of these, notably Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, having been translated and produced all over the world. During the Second World War he was exceedingly popular as a broadcaster.

Since the war his most important novels have been Bright Day, Festival at Farbridge, Lost Empires and The Image Men, and his more ambitious literary and social criticism can be found in Literature and Western Man, Man and Time and Journey Down a Rainbow, which he wrote with his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, a distinguished archaeologist and a well-established writer herself. It was in this last book that Priestley coined the term 'Admass', now in common use. Among his latest books are Victoria's Heydey (1972), Over the Long High Wall (1972), The English (1973), Outcries and Asides, a collection of essays (1974), A Visit to New Zealand (1974), The Carfitt Crisis (1975), Particular Pleasures (1975), Found, Lost, Found, or the English Way of Life (1976), The Happy Dream (1976), English Humour (1976) and an autobiography, Instead of the Trees (1977). In 1977 J. B. Priestley received the Order of merit.

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Unfortunately, we don't currently offer Express Delivery outside the UK, Gibraltar, Guernsey or Jersey. All deliveries are subject to cut-off times and public holidays. Welcome back , you are signed in Sign Out You are not currently signed in. Sign in Search Store An Inspector Calls : J. B. Priestley : 9781408467244 An Inspector Calls By (author) J. B. Priestley , Read by Frances Barber , Read by Full Cast , Read by Toby Jones Share Add to basket Add to wishlist Description The Birling family are spending a happy evening celebrating the engagement of Sheila Birling to Gerald Croft - a marriage that will result in the merging of two successful local businesses. Yet just when everything seems to be going so well, they receive a surprise visit from an Inspector Goole who is investigating the suicide of a young girl. As the Inspector reveals more about the circumstances that led to the death of Eva Smith, each member of the family comes under the spotlight, and questions of guilt and responsibility are raised...Toby Jones, David Calder, Frances Barber and Morven Christie are amongst the cast in this BBC Radio 4 production from 2010.

The Classic Radio Theatre range presents notable radio productions of much-loved plays by some of the most renowned playwrights, and starring some of our finest actors. 2 CDs. 1 hr 30 mins. show more Product details 124 x 140 x 10mm | 879.96g Publication date Literary Studies: Plays & Playwrights Review quote "Toby Jones is terrific as the mysterious inspector... David Calder, Frances Barber, Morvern Christie, Sam Alexander, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Vineeta Rishi complete the cast, offering a powerful new take on one of the 20th century's most thought-provoking plays." Chichester Observer show more About J. B. Priestley John Boynton Priestley was born in Yorkshire in 1894. He knew early on that he wanted to become a writer, but decided against going to university as he thought he would get a better feel for the world around him away from academia. Instead, he became a junior clerk with a local wool firm at the age of 16. When the First World War broke out, Priestley joined the infantry.

After the war, he gained a degree from Cambridge University, then moved to London to work as a freelance writer. He wrote successful articles and essays, then published the first of many novels, The Good Companions, in 1929. He wrote his first play, Dangerous Corner, in 1932 and went on to write 50 more including Time and the Conways (1937), I Have Been There Before (1938), When We Are Married (1938) and An Inspector Calls (1945). Much of his work was groundbreaking and controversial. He included new ideas about possible parallel universes and strong political messages. During the 1930s Priestley became very concerned about the consequences of social inequality in Britain, and in 1942 he and others set up a new political party, the Common Wealth Party, which argued for public ownership of land, greater democracy and a new morality in politics. The party merged with the Labour Party in 1945, but Priestley was influential in developing the idea of the Welfare State which began to be put in place at the end of the war.

He believed that further wars could only be avoided through cooperation and mutual respect between countries, and so became active in the early movement for a United Nations. As the nuclear arms race between West and East began in the 1950s, he helped to found CND. Throughout the Second World War he broadcast a massively popular weekly radio programme which was attacked by the Conservatives as being too left-wing. The programme was eventually cancelled by the BBC for being too critical of the Government. Priestley continued to write into the 1970s, and died in 1984. show more Review Text "Toby Jones is terrific as the mysterious inspector... David Calder, Frances Barber, Morvern Christie, Sam Alexander, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Vineeta Rishi complete the cast, offering a powerful new take on one of the 20th century's most thought-provoking plays." Chichester Observer show more Follow us Smashwords – About JB Priestley, author of 'Good Companions' JB Priestley Biography John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J. B.

Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls (1945). His output included literary and social criticism. Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "ultra-respectable" suburb of Bradford.[1] His father was a headmaster. His mother died when he was just two years old and his father remarried four years later.[2] Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.

Priestley served during the First World War in the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was wounded in 1916 by mortar fire. In his autobiography, Margin Released he is fiercely critical of the British Army and in particular of the officer class. After his military service Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. By the age of 30 he had established a reputation as a humorous writer and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel has been published under the film's name in the United States. Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement (1930), further established him as a successful novelist. However, some critics were less than complimentary about his work, and Priestley began legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).

In 1934 he published the travelogue English Journey, which is an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the autumn of the previous year.[3] He moved into a new genre and became equally well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner was the first of a series of plays that enthralled West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1945), later made into a film starring Alastair Sim released in 1954. His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937). Many of his works have a socialist aspect. For example, An Inspector Calls, as well as being a "Time Play", contains many references to socialism — the inspector was arguably an alter ego through which Priestley could express his views.[4]Priestley’s ‘Inspector Calls’ appears to simply tell the story of a young girl called Eva Smith and her tragic suicide. However, in reality it is much more than that.

It 'hits you over the head' with his views on socialism'. During World War II, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript, broadcast on Sunday night through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled. It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, Priestley's son has recently revealed in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.[5][6] Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee, and in 1942 he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and his hopes of a new and different England after the war influenced the politics of the period and helped the Labour Party gain its landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Priestley himself, however, was distrustful of the state and dogma.

Priestley's name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be inappropriate to write for the IRD.[7] He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. In 1960, Priestley published Literature and Western Man, a 500-page survey of Western literature in all its genres, including Russia and the United States but excluding Asia, from the second half of the 15th century to the present (the last author discussed is Thomas Wolfe). Although Priestley never wrote a formal book of memoirs, his literary reminiscences, Margin Released (1962), provide valuable insights into his work. The section dealing with his job as a teenage clerk in a Bradford wool-sorter's office manages to weave fine literature from an outwardly unpromising subject — a characteristic of many of his novels.

His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time (Aldus published this as a companion to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols). In this book he explored in depth various theories and beliefs about time as well as his own research and unique conclusions, including an analysis of the phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, based in part on a broad sampling of experiences gathered from the British public, who responded enthusiastically to a televised appeal he made while being interviewed in 1963 on the BBC programme, Monitor. Priestley was one of the interviewees for the documentary series The World at War (1973), in the episode "Alone: May 1940 – May 1941". He declined lesser honours before accepting the Order of Merit in 1977. The University of Bradford awarded Priestley the title of honorary Doctor of Letters in 1970, and he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Bradford in 1973. His connections with the city were also marked by the naming of the J. B.

Priestley Library at the University of Bradford, which he officially opened in 1975,[8] and by the larger-than-life statue of him, commissioned by the Bradford City Council after his death, and which now stands in front of the National Media Museum.[9] A special collector's edition of Bright Day was re-issued by Great Northern Books in 2006, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of this novel.[10] Priestley had a deep love of classical music, and in 1941 he played an important part in organising and supporting a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was struggling to establish itself as a self-governing body after the withdrawal of Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1949 the opera The Olympians by Arthur Bliss, to a libretto by Priestley, was premiered. Priestley snubbed the chance to become a lord in 1965 and investiture as a Companion of Honour in 1969.[11] But he did become a member of the Order of Merit in 1977. He also served as a British delegate to UNESCO conferences.

He was honoured by both the Universities of Birmingham and Bradford and the city of Bradford granted him Freedom of the City in 1973. He married three times. In 1921 he married Emily "Pat" Tempest, a music-loving Bradford librarian. Two daughters were born, one in 1923 and one in 1924, but in 1925 his wife died of cancer.[12] In September 1926, he married Jane Wyndham-Lewis (ex-wife of the original 'Beachcomber' D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, no relation to the artist Wyndham Lewis); they had two daughters and one son. In 1953, he divorced his second wife and married the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, his collaborator on the play Dragon's Mouth.[6] Where to find JB Priestley online

Question: Who wrote the books ‘The Good Companions’ and ‘An Inspector Calls’?
Answer: J.B. Priestly