Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin

Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 0571321844
  • Category : Poetry
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 192

Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen over seventy poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. Ranging from hidden treasures to famous poems, this is a collection for the beginner and the expert alike. Speaking with candour about his own reactions to the work, Alan Bennett creates profound and witty portraits of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin, all the more enjoyable for being in his own particular voice. Anybody writing poetry in the thirties had somehow to come to terms with Auden. Auden, you see, had got a head start on the other poets. He'd got into the thirties first, like someone taking over the digs.


Six Poets

Six Poets

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9781782831846
  • Category : English poetry
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 210

"Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary." --Publisher's description.


Six Poetshardy to L

Six Poetshardy to L

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 9780571323630
  • Category : English poetry
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 224

In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen over a hundred poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. Speaking with candour about his own reactions to the work, Alan Bennett creates profound and witty portraits of Thomas Hardy, A E Housman, John Betjeman, W H Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin, all the more enjoyable for being in his own particular voice. Signed edition.


1956

1956

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  • Author: Francis Beckett
  • Publisher: Biteback Publishing
  • ISBN: 1849549885
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 185

1956: a defining year that heralded the modern era.Britain and France occupied Suez, and the Soviet Union tanks rolled into Hungary. Nikita Khrushchev's 'secret speech' exposed the crimes of Stalin, and the Royal Court Theatre unveiled John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Rock 'n' roll music was replacing the gentle pop songs of Mum and Dad's generation, and it was the first full year of independent television.As post-war assumptions were shattered, the upper middle class was shaken and the communist left was shocked, radical new ideas about sex, skiffle and socialism emerged, and attitudes shifted on an unprecedented scale - precipitated by the decline of Attlee's Britain and the first intimations of Thatcher's.From politics and conflict to sport and entertainment, this extraordinary book transports us back in time on a whirlwind journey through the history, headlines and happenings of this most momentous of years, vividly capturing the revolutionary spirit of 1956 - the year that changed Britain.


Housman Country

Housman Country

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  • Author: Peter Parker
  • Publisher: Hachette UK
  • ISBN: 1408706148
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 544

Why is it that for many people 'England' has always meant an unspoilt rural landscape rather than the ever-changing urban world in which most English people live? What was the 'England' for which people fought in two world wars? What is about the English that makes them constantly hanker for a vanished past, so that nostalgia has become a national characteristic? In March 1896 a small volume of sixty-three poems was published by the small British firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd in an edition of 500 copies, priced at half-a-crown each. The author was not a professional poet, but a thirty-seven-year-old professor of Latin at University College, London called Alfred Edward Housman who had been obliged to pay £30 towards the cost of publication. Although slow to sell at first, A Shropshire Lad went on to become one of the most popular books of poetry ever published and has never been out of print. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the book has had an influence on English culture and notions of what 'England' means, both in England itself and abroad, out of all proportion to its apparent scope. Housman Country will not only look at how A Shropshire Lad came to be written and became a publishing and cultural phenomenon, but will use the poems as a prism through which to examine England and Englishness. The book contains a full transcript of A Shropshire lad itself, also making it a superb present.


Allelujah!

Allelujah!

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 0571349862
  • Category : Drama
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 122

- What were you in life?- In life, as you put it, I was a schoolmaster. The Beth, an old fashioned cradle-to-grave hospital serving a town on the edge of the Pennines, is threatened with closure as part of an NHS efficiency drive. As Dr Valentine and Sister Gilchrist attend to the patients, a documentary crew, eager to capture its fight for survival, follows the daily struggle to find beds on the Dusty Springfield Geriatric Ward. Meanwhile, the old people's choir, in readiness for next week's concert, is in full swing, augmented by the arrival of Mrs Maudsley, aka Pudsey Nightingale. Alan Bennett's Allelujah! opened at the Bridge Theatre, London, in July 2018. With an introduction by Alan Bennett.


Two Besides

Two Besides

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 0571365876
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 82

** Ebook available for pre-order now -- released 8 July 2020 ** Two brand-new monologues in the Talking Heads series, as seen on BBC1 and iPlayer 'Given the opportunity to revisit the characters from Talking Heads I've added a couple more, both of them ordinary women whom life takes by surprise. They just about end up on top and go on, but without quite knowing how. Still, they're in good company, and at least they've made it into print.' Alan Bennett's twelve Talking Heads are acknowledged masterworks by one of our most highly acclaimed writers. Some thirty years after the original six , Bennett has written Two Besides, a pair of monologues. Each, in its way, is a devastating portrait of grief. In An Ordinary Woman, a mother suffers the inevitable consequences when she makes life intolerable for herself and her family by falling for her own flesh and blood; while The Shrine tells the story behind a makeshift roadside shrine, introducing us to Lorna, bearing witness in her high-vis jacket, the bereft partner of a dedicated biker with a surprising private life. The two new Talking Heads were recorded for the BBC during the exceptional circumstances of coronavirus lockdown in the spring of 2020, directed by Nicholas Hytner and performed by Sarah Lancashire and Monica Dolan. The book contains a substantial preface by Nicholas Hytner and an introduction to each, by Alan Bennett.


The Shielding of Mrs Forbes

The Shielding of Mrs Forbes

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 0571354769
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 69

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called Footballers with Their Shirts Off when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hairdryer. 'I didn't know you were interested in football,' said Betty. No one must ever find out that Graham is 'not the marrying sort'. Certainly not his wife, or his mother. As sex, blackmail and fanatical tidiness take over the West Yorkshire parish of Alwoodley, an unlikely caper unfolds.


Talking Heads

Talking Heads

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  • Author: Alan Bennett
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • ISBN: 0571365396
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 243

Theebook edition of Alan Bennett's celebrated monologues'Alan Bennett's Talking Heads is pretty much the best thing ever.' David SedarisAlan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with Talking Heads, a series of twelve groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television, starring Patricia Routledge, Thora Hird, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Stephanie Cole, Eileen Atkins, David Haig, Penelope Wilton and Alan Bennett himself. Uplifting, deeply moving, full of humanity and wit, they remain essential, glorious reading.


Remembering Home in a Time of Mobility

Remembering Home in a Time of Mobility

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  • Author: Maja Mikula
  • Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • ISBN: 1443878685
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 260

Memory, nostalgia and melancholy have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. Numerous critics of globalisation, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism have posited an overwhelming feeling of homelessness not only among people who have been displaced from their original home/lands, but also among those who feel estranged from their places of origin due to rapid social change or environmental decline. Arguably, homesickness is prevalent in today’s developed world, and can be – and sometimes indeed is – felt even for times and places unrelated to someone’s personal roots. Memory has been mobilised to justify recent conflicts, to question mainstream interpretations of past events, or to demand compensation for the suffering of earlier generations. Nostalgia has been employed as a “utopia in reverse”, revealing more about our unattainable “ideal present”, than about the elusive “lost” past it invokes. A corollary of nostalgia in the late modern politics of loss, melancholy has been a way of dis-identifying from both the horrors of recent history, and the growing insecurities of the present. The volume raises complex questions related to the ways people have coped with displacement and time-space compression, arguably the two most manifest symptoms of late modernity. How do we grapple with the traumatic experience of the loss of home? What strategies do we use, and what is their underlying politics? How do they intersect with identity positions, such as gender, class and sexuality? How might they contribute to the preservation of national cultures? How has our understanding of home changed in a time of mobility and flow? Spanning multiple Eurasian and Northern American cultural contexts, the book is of interest to an international academic readership within the fields of cultural studies, memory studies, gender studies, literature, art, performance, film and media studies.