The English are regarded by the rest of the world as dull, stuffy, unimaginative and unromantic. But if this is a fair then where did the literature come from? J.B. Priestley is one of several men of letters born at the turn of the century who worried about the image, the reality…and the discrepancies…which he sought to understand and explain.

This would eventually lead him down many fascinating avenues…English humour, literature, the strangeness of time and social history. One of his conclusions was eerily similar to that of Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. The world they knew was vanishing and Englishness was going with it.

Jack Priestley survived the First World War and on his return to Civvy Street he worked as a journalist in London, writing for various newspapers and periodicals…including the New Statesman…and turning out an essay per week for his first few working years. ‘To learn how to do anything…do it!’ was Aristotle’s advice and there is no better advice for the budding writer.

In the mid-1920s Priestley turned his hand to novels…culminating with the runaway success of The Good Companions which set him up as a Man of Letters for the rest of his long life. His second novel Angel Pavement is a tour de force but failed to impress critics looking for more of the high jinks of his first novel.

Once Priestley had started to write fiction he worked as a fulltime writer disciplining himself to a rigid daily writing schedule that produced two or three books a year. But public acclaim did not really arrive until late middle age when the BBC made the quirky decision to employ him as a radio broadcaster.

In 1940 after the debacle of Dunkerque, the part Priestley played was as important as that of Churchill in turning this devastating defeat into future victories. Priestley established himself in the short space of three months as the real voice of the common people. But Priestley's patriotism had no military edge. It sprang from love of his homeland and not from hate of the foreigner.

By the 1940s Priestley was well known as a playwright but regarded as a lightweight by the Bloomsbury Set and their literary hinterland. But this set had a tendency to dismiss anyone who was not one of them as boring. Priestley took a very different attitude. He saw mystery and wonder in everything and was enraptured by the sheer diversity of humanity.

Unlike Virginia Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre and their disciples, Priestley was in the Checkov camp that delighted in people…warts and all. Besides his preference for working at his craft rather than posing for his contemporaries was part of the reason. But his unapologetic insistence on addressing what he had to say to the common man and woman would always set him apart. And it seems that the critics have won.

In the 1950s Priestley immediately understood the significance of the Atomic Bomb and played an important role in the establishment of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By his sixties Priestley’s writing and thinking had matured to such a degree that there is little penned between 1960 and 1984 that is without insight and wisdom.

During the course of his lifetime Priestley became world famous as an essayist, playwright, novelist, social critic and historian. He also wrote an opera libretto…The Olympians…a television screen play, poetry and short stories. But today his books are mostly out of print and his name is all but forgotten except in the dusty forgotten stacks of university libraries and used book dealers…a most undeserved fate for one of the deepest thinkers and most influential essayists and playwrights of the twentieth century. But he will rise again.

In a 15-year period after his 70th birthday Priestley published twenty-one books. He had that rare ability to see deeper and further than his contemporaries. He also held the conviction that his work should be accessible to the common people and not just to the professors. Ordinary people did not take a delight in abstract arguments. Indeed they neither understand them nor care to know about them.

In The Magicians for instance Priestley uses Ouspensky’s time-recurrence theory to argue that we should take seriously our time on earth. It may be all the time we have…and we may have it for an eternity. He used the novel form so that this idea might be shared with ordinary people.

Priestley was offered a knighthood and a peerage as a token of his homeland's esteem for his work but he refused them both…eventually settline for the Order of Merit in 1977. Priestley was an energetic essay writer in his early years and returned to the genre in later life when at the height of his powers with knowledge, experience and literary skills.

Right up to the end of his life he would deliver astonishing little masterpieces. Each carried a sense of purpose and great depth of meaning. Delights would make an excellent Book of The Day for some enterprising publisher while his biographical essays like Over the Long, High Wall and Journey over the Rainbow…written with Jaquetta Hawkes…are literary masterpieces. Literature and Western Man and his forgotten and underrated political tract Topside are superbly crafted examples of their type.

Priestley was a man with something to say. But he also knew how to say it well so as to command attention. The political and cultural establishments were always wary of him. He was seldom on message. He disapproved of most of them and much of what they did…and he was not afraid to say so.