Summary of J. B. Priestley

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J. B. Priestley was a British author, playwright, and broadcaster. He was a left-winger and had many conflicts with the British government. He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.

• 00:00:00 John Boynton Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, and broadcaster. He was born in Manningham, Bradford, in 1871 and educated at Belle Vue Grammar School. He served in the First World War and was badly wounded in 1916. After the war, he studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and achieved success as an essayist and critic. His best-known works include The Good Companions and Angel Pavement. Priestley was a left-winger and had many conflicts with the British government. He died in 1984.
• 00:05:00 J. B. Priestley was a writer and broadcaster who was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled due to complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing. 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. 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, though he did stand for the Cambridge University constituency in 1945. 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. He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. In 1960, Priest
• 00:10:00 J. B. Priestley was a British author who is best known for his novels and plays. He was also a social and political commentator. His works include novels, short stories, plays, and essays.