I Can't Stay Long PDF Download

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497641381
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

View

Book Description
The essential Laurie Lee, a collection of occasional writings full of his unique vision and irresistible charm All of the wit and wisdom and poetry that made Laurie Lee one of the most celebrated English writers of the twentieth century can be found in this compilation of “first loves and obsessions.” In Part One, Lee revisits his idyllic boyhood in the Cotswolds village made famous by his bestselling autobiography, Cider with Rosie. In Part Two, he turns his attention to an earnest consideration of abstract concepts such as the power of charm, the pleasures of appetite, and the meaning of paradise. And in the final and longest section, the author of the acclaimed Spanish travelogues As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Rose for Winter tells the stories of his many other journeys—from sun-dappled Tuscany to melancholy Warsaw to the enchanting and exotic Sugar Islands of the Caribbean.

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 1567923925
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

View

Book Description
"I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far." Despite this romantic and optimistic opening, what Lee finds is the most primitive and feudal country in Europe, a peninsula untouched by the modern world, a land of labor without dignity, a church devoid of compassion, and a country ripe for revolutionary change.

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
ISBN: 9780701168629
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past. In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War. The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption. Rosie's identity from the novel Cider with Rosie was kept secret for 25 years. She was Rose Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage. "From the Paperback edition."

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 149764139X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 105

View

Book Description
A memoir of the Spanish Civil War with “the plainness of Orwell but the metaphorical soaring of a poem . . . An extraordinary book” (The New York Times Book Review). In December 1937 I crossed the Pyrenees from France—two days on foot through the snow. I don’t know why I chose December; it was just one of a number of idiocies I committed at the time. Such was Laurie Lee’s entry into the Spanish Civil War. Six months after the Nationalist uprising forced him to leave the country he had grown to love, he returned to offer his life for the Republican cause. It seemed as simple as knocking on a farmhouse door in the middle of the night and declaring himself ready to fight. It would not be the last time he was almost executed for being a spy. In that bitter winter in a divided Spain, Lee’s youthful idealism came face to face with the reality of war. The International Brigade he sought to join was not a gallant fighting force, but a collection of misfits without proper leadership or purpose. Boredom and bad food and false alarms were as much a part of the experience of war as actual battle. And when the decisive moment finally came—the moment of him or the enemy—it left Lee feeling the very opposite of heroic. The final volume in Laurie Lee’s acclaimed autobiographical trilogy—preceded by Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning—is a clear-eyed and vital snapshot of a young man, and a proud nation, at a historic crossroads.

Author: Valerie Grove
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 612

View

Book Description
Despite his autobigraphical writings, despite his gregarious appearances on the London literary scene and in the village pub where he was always available to fans, Laurie Lee was a secretive man.

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241243688
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

View

Book Description
From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world.

Author: Valerie Grove
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1849547688
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 382

View

Book Description
Millions of readers know and love him for his lyrical portraits of his life, from the moving and nostalgic tales of childhood and innocence found in the pages of Cider with Rosie, to the nomadic wanderings through Spain retold in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, to his dramatic experiences fighting Franco's forces in A Moment of War. As a poet, playwright, broadcaster and writer, Laurie Lee created a legend around himself that would see him safely secured in the literary canon even within his own lifetime. Yet, though he wrote exclusively about his own life, Lee never told the whole story. His readers know him as a man devoted to two women: his wife and his daughter, 'the firstborn'. Among the pages of his published works there is little trace of the girls he left behind. He never identifi ed in print the girl who inspired him to go to Spain, or the woman who supported him there. He never named the beautiful mistress he came home to, who was the great love of his young life and who led him into literary London, bore his child and broke his heart. In The Life and Loves of Laurie Lee, acclaimed biographer Valerie Grove delves into the letters and diaries he kept hidden from the world, building on her magisterial study of the charismatic poet to capture the essence of this romantic, elusive enigma and bring him to life once more.

Author: Alastair Humphreys
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008331839
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019 Seasoned adventurer Alastair Humphreys pushes himself to his very limits – busking his way across Spain with a violin he can barely play.

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141927372
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

View

Book Description
'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497641365
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 18

View

Book Description
An intimate and lyrical consideration of what it means to be a father This moment of meeting seemed to be a birth-time for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again . . . Full of warmth and candor, this essay composed on the occasion of his daughter’s birth is one of Laurie Lee’s most delightful and inspiring works. From the moment Jessy is born, “purple and dented like a bruised plum,” to the first time his kiss quiets her cries, Lee describes the joys and responsibilities of new fatherhood with a poet’s precision and boundless capacity for wonder.