Lost Empires - V686 [Paperback]

J B Priestley (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (December 12, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394746864
• ISBN-13: 978-0394746869
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,309,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is Priestley's fiction at its best, May 5, 2000

By 

Owen Hughes (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost Empires - V686 (Paperback)

"Lost Empires" takes us back into the world of the music hall in England in the early part of this century. Mr. Priestley's gift is characterization and here he takes us on a merry dance around the traps with as fell a cast as ever graced the none-too-genteel provincial stage. It is a book with laughter for itself and for its comic characters and, as always with J. B. Priestley, it has its moments of social satire in which we can all, perhaps, feel we might be at home. Like the longer, sturdier tale, "Good Companions," "Lost Empires" will leave you on a high, having completed a very satisfactory tour of a world long vanished, but whose echoes are still recognizable today. Language and craft, satire and straight-out good fun all abound here. Happily, Mr. Priestley does not leave us dangling for want of more; numerous other works of his are still in print today, which I suppose is the proof of this particular pudding. Not to be overlooked!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Forgotten World..., August 18, 2005

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost Empires - V686 (Paperback)

Before there was radio, before there were movies, before TV, there were the great British music halls, called "Empires" with their Vaudevillian comedies and light drama. In this novel by the English writer J.B. Priestly, the main character, an eighteen-year-old aspiring artist, leaves his rural village after the death of his mother, and travels through the Empire circuit with his uncle, a famous stage magician. Beginning in 1913 and for the most part concluding at the start of WWI a year and a half later, this story brings a by-gone era back to life and shows us how actors and actresses of the pre-film era lived, worked, and in a few memorable cases in this book, how they died as well.