<p>Tom Courtenay was born in Hull in 1937 and brought up near the fish dock where his father worked. When he left home for university, his mother, Annie, wrote to him every week and when her letters became more searching and more intimate in response to Tom's unhappiness he kept every one, not knowing that after her early death they were to become his most treasured possession. Tom has selected the best of them to go in this book and interwoven with them a portrait of what was going on in his life at the time, in the heady days of the early Sixties when successful young working-class actors were coming to the fore for the first time. Annie's letters are astonishing - wise, funny, with a natural instinct for words, but also deeply painful. She knows she's worthy of a better, more creative life, but she hasn't been given the chance. Partly a memoir of a working-class way of life that has gone for ever, partly a powerfully moving record of the love between mother and son, partly a portrait of the artist as a young actor, "Dear Tom" is sure to excite admiration and delight in equal measure.</p>

Dear Tom

Biographies & Memoirs

Tom Courtenay

Arts & Literature

Black Swan.

PRETENDING TO BE ME is an intimate, acerbic and occasionally scurrilous show about the poet, jazz aficionado and Hull University librarian, Philip Larkin. Larkin ('the magnificent Eeyore of British verse' - Daily Telegraph) has moved home; surrounded by packing cases, playing selections from his favourite jazz LPs, and making himself cups of tea - and later whiskies - he reflects wryly on writing and life. Hilarious and moving, the narrative shifts seamlessly between Larkin's outrageous wit and the poems, which Courtenay reads with powerful directness and simplicity. PHILIP LARKIN, one of the foremost figures in 20th-Century English poetry, feared his epitaph would be: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad'. This, and other familiar poems, 'An Arundel Tomb', 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'High Windows' are included in PRETENDING TO BE ME.

Pretending to Be Me : Philip Larkin, a Portrait

Arts & Photography

Music

Time Warner AudioBooks

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Books by Tom Courtenay