The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr

by Byron Rogers (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $6.29

  This biography of the novelist and publisher J.L. Carr. is a sympathetic, moving and often very funny portrait of a uniquely civic-minded man whose achievements ranged from half a dozen fascinatingly original novels to publishing some of the smallest and most collectable books ever, to a lifetime's career as a humane and iconoclastic Northamptonshire headmaster - but also, and above all, as an anatomy of Englishness. Carr's interests and passions represented much of the best of England, from the game of cricket to the endangered country church, from an unswerving sympathy for the underdog and the underprivileged to a hatred of bigotry and showmanship.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $7.35

  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.