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The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L.Carr
Author(s): Byron Rogers (Author)
- Publisher: Aurum Press
- Publication Date: 22 May 2003
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 1854108387
- ISBN-13: 9781854108388
Book Description
J.L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: a man who spent most of his working life in the middle of Middle England, as headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, an enthusiastic follower of cricket and a tireless campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen of the quirkiest, most comic novels in English, a publisher (from his own back bedroom in Kettering) of some of the most eccentric, collectable – and smallest – books ever printed, and an enigmatic, elusive individual. Among Carr’s novels are “A Month in the Country”, his moving story of a World War I survivor that is now a Penguin Classic – which won the Guardian Fiction Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a highly successful film starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth; “How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup”, now published as a Prion Humour Classic and acclaimed as one of the funniest novels ever written about football, and “The Harpole Report”, acknowledged to be one of the funniest novels ever written about a school. Meanwhile his own self-published “Carr’s Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers” became the smallest bestseller ever printed. This biography tells the life story of this fascinating man – a life both surprising and varied, from war service on a West African flying-boat base to a strange interlude teaching in the heart of South Dakota – and discovers a headmaster who would hold arithmetic races on sports day, a mysterious individual who buried all his treasures in his garden and was someone different to everyone who met him, and a novelist whose fiction is partially autobiographical.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Byron Rogers writes for the Sunday Telegraph, Guardian and Saga magazine. His collected travel writing, An Audience with an Elephant, was published by Aurum Press in 2001.
