Nights at the Theatre

Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre by Beryl Bainbridge From 1992 until 2002, Beryl was the theatre reviewer for The Oldie magazine, and  her reviews have been collected in this volume. Collected columns like these can easily date, however Beryl prefaces each review in her idiosyncratic style with comments about what she’d been doing, or thoughts about arriving at the Read More

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”

A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge Alan sits in a café waiting for his sister Madge, whom he hasn’t seen for fifteen years – there to discuss their late mother’s effects. Both are now in their forties, and they’re still as different as chalk and cheese. Rewind twenty-five years. It’s the 1950s; petrol is still Read More

Dinner Parties – A Risky Business!

Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge Dinner parties… Love ’em, loathe ’em – but from the mid 1970s to perhaps as far as the late 1990s they were a symbol of the middle classes. The kitchen-sink drama moved into the Dining Room. Acceptance of your position in the hierarchy by giving dinner parties was soon replaced by Read More

Beryl on the box & big screen …

Today, I offer you a survey of Beryl’s work for TV and film, with as many links to clips as I can find… During the early part of her career, Beryl was an actress.  In 1961, she famously appeared in one episode of Coronation Street as the peace-protesting girlfriend of Ken Barlow. See BB in Corrie. She wrote Read More

Love the one you’re with – the Bainbridge version

Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge I was thinking of an apt title for this post and was planning on calling it ‘The man who loved women‘ after the celebrated François Truffaut film, but then I remembered the Stephen Stills song ‘Love the one you’re with‘. It seemed to encapsulate Bainbridge’s 1975 novel in a nutshell. (More Read More

Two Naughty Schoolgirls…

Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge Harriet Said was Beryl’s first  work written in the late 1950s.  However it ended up as her third published novel, as its darkness struggled to find a publisher initially.  It is the story of two teenaged schoolgirls and what they got up to one summer holiday… The two girls are an Read More

Definitely not a misery memoir…

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson In anyone else’s hands, this would be a misery memoir, however, in Jeanette Winterson’s, the memoir become more of a search for happiness. Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy – which I Read More

A new heart of darkness?

The Devil’s Garden by Edward Docx Set primarily in the last inhabited river station up a tributary of the mighty Amazon, The Devil’s Garden conjures up strong visions and parallels. You immediately think of other ‘jungle’ novels – Heart of Darkness being the obvious one of course, and indeed they do share some heavy themes. Read More