Stop the Clocks

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell has led a varied sometimes breathless life: she has been a teacher copywriter studio manager broadcaster journalist the government's Voice of Older People and chair of the theatre company Shared Experience. She has written four radio plays two novels and an autobiography ­- The Centre of The Bed. Now in her 80s she is still broadcasting. Though it may look as though she is now part of the establishment - a Dame President of Birkbeck College a Member of the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport - she's anything but and remains outspoken and courageous. In Stop the Clocks she muses on all she has lived through how the world has changed and considers the things and values she will be leaving behind.

Stop the Clocks is a book of musings a look back at what she was given by her family at the times in which she grew up - ranging from the minutiae of life such as the knowledge of how to darn and how to make a bed properly with hospital corners to the bigger lessons of politics of lovers of betrayal. She talks of the present of her family of friends and literature - and talks too of what she will leave behind. This is a thoughtful moving and spirited book as only could be expected from this extraordinary woman.

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