Particular Pleasures

As readers of his very successful social histories, such as The Edwardians and Victoria's Heyday, will have realized, Mr Priestley is a shrewd, sensitive and wide-ranging critic not only of literature but also of the visual arts, music and drama. In this book, which has given him - so he tells us - especial pleasure in the writing, he recalls the pleasure that he has derived in a long life from particular artists and paintings, music and musicians, plays, films, and actors and actresses. He has the gift of summing up briefly yet with exceptional understanding the especial merits of painters as diverse as Turner and de Stael, Gainsborough and Vuillard, Watteau and Bonnard, Cezanne and Sickert. He has a profound knowledge of music - he is indeed an ardent pianist himself - and he expresses with great sensitivity the delight he has had from a variety of very different kinds of music. He is as illuminating on Bartok and Bruckner as he is on Mahler and Walton. As one of the great playwrights of our time he has an intimate practical knowledge of the theatre, and his vignettes of great stage and screen scenes and acting performances of the past seventy years are as vivid as any dramatic critic could provide, and they have the special value of frequently being based upon personal experiences in production and rehearsal. The book is illustrated with marvellous examples in colour of the paintings he has enjoyed, and evocative portraits of the musicians, the actors and actresses and the clowns whose performances he celebrates.