Priestley here encapsulates many of the things I love about twentieth-century writing: chiefly among them the true realisation and reckoning with the passage of time in a turbulent century.

The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war. All in all though this all took a week and meant I was reading and preparing for 4 hours well into the night to prepare for my pupil who had by this time missed a couple of lessons! It’s not strictly a murder mystery, yet the offstage suicide from which its plot springs might just as well have been a murder.The publication of English Journey in 1934 emphasised Priestley's concern for social problems and the welfare of ordinary people. I absolutely loved the building up of the suspense, the characters and how each of them had a story, the interconnection of the lives of all the characters, and the message behind it. Reading plays without having seen them performed live, is not always a pleasure, but Priestley manages to pull-off that trick, with some outstandingly clever exchanges between complex characters who break that fourth wall and have you wanting to join in and add your two penno'th, as he might well have said himself! His favourite among his books was for many years the novel Bright Day, though he later said he had come to prefer The Image Men. But the man she chooses, the proud young Count of Rossillion, refuses to consummate the forced marriage and flees to Florence.

I don’t really know how I evaded reading this throughout my whole school career but I’m glad I’ve finally had to read it. In exposing the past and revealing moral failings, he’s like the personification of Ibsen’s dramatic principles; the interconnections he uncovers are similar to what Priestley had established through other means in I Have Been Here Before. The play is both fatalistic (we keep making the same mistakes because we don’t know enough ahead of time to avoid them) and optimistic (with effort and perhaps luck, we can know); it could’ve been popular in the 60s.

Jean and the social climber Marion (married to a French aristocrat), agree - only his youngest daughter, Dinah, is with the Professor who plans to fight tooth and nail to stick on. This particular version has no notes whatsoever to help - not that I esentially needed them, but if this were being purchased by a student they should bear that in mind. For this reason, reading the plays in succession, it felt repetitive to me - maybe it's different on stage, however. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you.