Awards

• Winner of Theatre Book Prize 2006
• Winner of Theatre Book Prize 2006.

Overview

Full Product Details

9780099275862

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Heilpern] writes with infectious verve, championing the plays against carpers and cavillers, and showing how close they were to their creator's raw experience. Above all he celebrates Osborne's cross-grained vitality. His book brings a flesh-and-blood human being back from the shades, shouting, like Jimmy Porter 'Hallelujah! I'm alive!' -- John Carey Sunday Times His biography is surely a model of its kind: tightly written, vivid, witty, knowledgeable and with a seamless, and often moving, interweaving of the past and present -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday An enjoyable, exhaustive, well-researched and highly readable biography -- Michael Arditti Independent Heilpern has produced a riveting biography - Heilpern orchestrates his complex narrative with flair and contrives to invoke affection in the face of bad behaviour...judicious and dependable -- Valerie Grove The Times Osborne has found his ideal biographer John Banville

Miraculous. . . . A model of what a literary biography ought to be. . . . The Osborne who emerges from these pages is a character of almost Shakespearean dimensions, grand as Falstaff, volatile as Hamlet, mad as Lear. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer <br> A terrific story. . . . An appealing, rollicking portrait. . . . The best literary biography I have read in a long time. <br>--Harold Evans, The Wall Street Journal <br> I cannot recall a biography that was so amusing and intense. . . . If there is going to be a better-written, more entertaining, or more sharply observed performance this year, I'll be mighty surprised. --Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

Author Information

Born in Manchester and educated at Oxford, John Heilpern wrote award-winning interviews for the Observer before becoming a Times columnist in New York. He has worked with Peter Hall at the National Theatre and with Michael Bennett on Broadway. He is the author of a classic book about the theatre, Conference of the Birds- The Story of Peter Brook in Africa, and of How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway - Writings on Theatre and Why it Matters. He now lives in Manhattan where he is drama critic of the New York Observer.

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