Anthony Peake and Katy Price will be giving lectures on ‘J. B. Priestley, Dreams and Time at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, between 2 – 4pm on Saturday 31 October.
To register and book a free place visit: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jb-priestley-society-annual-lecture-2015. The lectures are free and open to the public as well as members of the J.B. Priestley Society.
J.B. Priestley was fascinated by time. This most ephemeral of perceptions re-occurs as a theme over and over again in his plays. He also wrote extensively about the subject in his autobiographical works, culminating in his fascinating work Man and Time.
Anthony Peake will discuss major influences on Priestley’s philosophy of time, especially as seen in his ‘Time Plays.’ In 1963 Priestley appealed to the public on BBC television’s Monitorprogramme to send in their own accounts of experiences that appeared to challenge the ‘common-sense’ idea of Time, including precognitive dreams. Anthony was the first person, since JBP himself, to be given access to all of those letters.
Anthony is a writer who deals with borderline areas of human consciousness. His first book,Is There Life After Death? was published in 2006 and since then he has gone on to develop his own ideas together with exploring the latest areas of research in his field. For more information about Anthony visit his website a:t anthonypeake.com.
Dr Katy Price’s lecture will briefly review the terms on which Priestley’s writings are being appreciated by literary scholars today, before turning to the Monitor letters themselves as a rich repository for social history. It is thanks to Priestley’s appeal for time experiences that we have access to records of people’s reading habits and inner lives in the mid twentieth century.
Katy Price is the author of Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe, and is currently writing a book about prophetic dreams in the twentieth century. She is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University, London.
