John Betjeman: A Life in Pictures

The most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson (‘a people’s poet’, as the Press described him on his death in May 1984), Sir John Betjeman was as much and widely loved, through the media of television and radio, for his great enthusiasms, his championship of unfashionable causes and his sheer enjoyment of people and things. This tribute to him is an album of some 400 photographs, caricatures, and Betjeman’s  own drawings, covering every aspect of his life, together with an introduction and commentary. It has been compiled over a period of years while Bevis Hillier researched the fuller, authorized biography on which he is engaged. Sir John’s life was colorful and varied – a microcosm of a wide social and literary scene over the last sixty years, or far longer if one counts the company which his friendships with Max Beerbohm, Lord Alfred Douglas, Harold Acton and others link him. This book is therefore no ordinary pictorial record. It is a rich gallery of genius and folly; a window looking back into the carefree 1920s; a choice iconography of both ‘society’, in the gossip-column sense, and the literary circles of Betjeman’s time (Eliot, Auden, Waugh, Anthony Powell and others are here, as well as many less famous).