HOW THE LAUDED ONES FALL from favour is a mystery. It seems only the day before yesterday that Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch were accorded an honoured place in our literary life. Now they have dropped off fashion’s cliff, though it’s always wise to remember what Tom Courtenay said of fashion, “When you see who is considered to be ‘in’, it’s such a relief to be out.”
For three decades after the publication of in 1929, Jolly Jack Priestley was an unignorable presence. These days his novels are read by. So it was a bright idea of Stuart Maconie, one of Radio 4’s favoured humming-birds, to ask “Whatever Became of JB Priestley?”
