Böcker av Brian Johnston

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Following the success of A Delicious Slice of Johnners, Barry Johnston has edited another delightful anthology based on three of his father s most popular books, Brian Johnston s Guide to Cricket, Chatterboxes and It s Been a Piece of Cake.

When Brian Johnston was a schoolboy, his reports were full of phrases such as 'talks too much in school' and 'apt to be a buffoon'. Later millions of radio listeners would be delighted to discover that some things never changed! Johnners brought his unique wit and personal charm to an enormous range of BBC radio and television programmes for nearly 50 years, from In Town Tonight and Down Your Way to Test Match Special. After Brian died in 1994, Christopher Martin-Jenkins wrote: 'It is hard to believe that anyone in the history of broadcasting has induced such widespread affection'. A Further Slice of Johnners covers Brian's early days, from his childhood in Hertfordshire and his schooldays at Eton and Oxford to his job in the family coffee business in the City and his service with the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War. There is also a selection of the most memorable characters and locations from his fifteen years on the Radio Four programme Down Your Way. Finally there is a collection of Brian's popular 'View From the Boundary' interviews on Test Match Special, including fascinating conversations with Eric Idle, John Major and Peter O'Toole.

Following Brian Johnston's death in 1994, Prime Minister John Major appeared to speak for the nation when he remarked that 'Summers will never be the same.' To an Englishman's ears, the sound of leather against willow will always be closely associated with the cheerful tones of Johnners.Brian Johnston was a man who admitted: 'I have this absurd hankering to make people laugh.' He also summed up his books as 'the meanderings of a remarkably happy and lucky person, to whom life, like cricket, is a funny game and still a lot of fun.' Lovingly edited by his eldest son, Barry, A Delicious Slice of Johnners is a wonderfully enjoyable compendium of three of Johnners' best loved books, the autobiographies It's Been a Lot of Fun and It's a Funny Game, and Rain Stops Play

Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the realist method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and props, of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and cultural identity in its multilayered totality. Johnston argues that Ibsen's realist text, while stimulating the appearance of nineteenth-century life, also objectively and precisely builds up an alternative image in which archetypal figures and situations from our cultural past repossess the realist stage. Thus he sees the Ibsen strategy in his realist plays as twofold: (1) the dialectical subversion of the nineteenth-century reality presented in the plays, and (2) the forced recovery of the archetypal from the past, in a procedure similar to James Joyce's in Ulysses. By supertext Johnston means a reservoir of cultural reference upon which Ibsen continuously drew in his realist work just as in is earlier poetic and historical dramas.