Showing posts with label Joan Bakewell. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

This much I know /Joan Bakewell / I wasn’t insulted by the ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ label

Joan Bakewell

This much I know

Interview

Joan Bakewell: I wasn’t insulted by the ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ label

The broadcaster, 83, on the swinging 60s, the 10 comandments and hanging out with Harold Pinter

My hero / Joan Bakewell by Kirsty Wark

Joanne O'Connor
Saturday 8 October 2016

The war shaped me. I’m still very thrifty – I save string and elastic bands – and I’m hugely patriotic, although not in a Ukip way. It made me realise that you can’t hang around. You’ve got to get as much satisfaction out of life as you can because you might be bombed tomorrow.

'Where do I think best? In bed' – authors reveal their dream retreats

Paul Bowles in Tanger

'Where do I think best? In bed' – authors reveal their dream retreats

A hotel on the Moray Firth estuary; an adrenaline-filled auction room in west London; an ad man’s office in Manhattan on DVD … AL Kennedy, William Boyd and others celebrate their cultural hideouts

by William Boyd, AL Kennedy, Nicola Barker, Joan Bakewell and Daljit Nagra
Friday 29 December 2017

AL Kennedy

AL Kennedy: My bed

I’m typing this in bed – but more of that later. Writers asked to expatiate on cultural or creative spaces may tend to feel they have to swear they can’t add one word to another without staying in a Tuscan palazzo, or being surrounded by folk musicians from obscure mountain villages and their charmingly artisanal children. (Sort of like Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes only more lifestyley.) This helps advertisers offer you Tuscan holiday packages, or mountain socks made from homespun doghair.

Joan Bakewell tells her side of the story about her affair with Harold Pinter

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell tells her side of the story about her affair with Harold Pinter

In response to Pinter’s hit 1978 play Betrayal, which chronicled their relationship, Bakewell wrote Keeping in Touch – which is to be aired on Radio 4

Published: Saturday, 22nd April 2017 at 8:00 am

When Joan Bakewell embarked on an eight-year affair with the playwright Harold Pinter in the 1960s, she never suspected he would make a play out of it. But then he wrote Betrayal and sent it to Bakewell for her comments. Her first response was horror.

Joan Bakewell

A Day in the Life

The Sunday Times Magazine. Writer’s Cut

Dame Joan Bakewell has been a leading broadcaster, journalist and author since the 1960s, when comedian Frank Muir dubbed her “the thinking man’s crumpet”. Now 86, she was awarded a life peerage in 2011 and took the title Baroness Bakewell of Stockport to reflect her Northern upbringing. She has been married twice and famously had an eight-year affair from 1962 with playwright Harold Pinter, which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal. Bakewell lives alone in Primrose Hill, North London, and has two children from her first marriage, Harriet, 59, and Matthew, 57 and six grandchildren, aged 18-26.

24 MARCH 20019

My day begins with a rigid routine that gradually gets ragged as the day continues. The alarm goes off at 6.50am, which gives me time to fetch a cup of tea and come back to bed to listen to the Radio 4 news at 7am. I have Earl Grey – always decaffeinated because I have a lot of adrenaline of my own. I’ve not had caffein for at least ten years, so if I ever have it these days without knowing I’m as high as a kite.

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell: I met Harold Pinter in Paris and was back for children's supper

18 April, 2017 07:06

Joan Bakewell has told how she once jetted to Paris to spend the day with playwright Harold Pinter during their affair before returning to England to cook dinner for her children.

The Labour peer, 84, is preparing to release her own account of the eight-year relationship nearly four decades after Pinter used it as the basis for his play Betrayal.

Joan Bakewell

HEART OF THE MATTER:

Joan Bakewell reveals how her affair with Harold Pinter - and the play in spawned still dominates her life

She was the original 'thinking man's crumpet' and remains disarmingly frank about sex. But as Joan Bakewell reveals in this compelling interview, she is still not over her affair with the playwright.

By JAN MOIR FOR THE DAILY MAIL
UPDATED: 19:38 BST, 4 March 2009

Dame Joan Bakewell points a finger in my direction 'You make me laugh,' she says, although she is not laughing. Not really.

Fresh from fluffing her hair and applying a stripe of lipstick, she whisks around her home with the lively intent of someone far younger than her 75 years. Half a life younger, to be honest.

My hero / Joan Bakewell by Kirsty Wark

Joan Bakewell interviews Harold Pinter on Late NIght Line-Up.

My hero:

Joan Bakewell by Kirsty Wark

Joan was, and still is, a role model – a sassy, bright young woman who looked so incredibly modern and relaxed on television

Friday 21 March 2014

have a very clear memory of watching Joan Bakewell (pictured with Harold Pinter) on Late Night Line-Up. The programme ran during my formative teenage years and even now when, preparing to write this article, I listen to the opening theme tune it takes me right back to the late 1960s.

My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell

Detail from a portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Roger Fry. Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library

My hero John Maynard Keynes

by Joan Bakewell

'He went out of fashion when the monetarists held sway, so it was good to see Keynesianism back as the only way to get us out of the credit crisis of 2007/08'

Joan Bakewell
Sat 19 Jun 2010 00.06 BST

When I arrived at Cambridge to read economics in the 1950s one of the first things I did was to join the Marshall Society. Alfred Marshall had founded the Cambridge School of Economics, and its influence was everywhere. Keynes had followed him, and by then his economic theories were in the ascendant, and were to remain so until 1979. I persist in believing they were right.

Keynes was a man of prodigious intellectual gifts, who straddled the worlds of banking, politics, the City, journalism and the arts, playing a significant role in all of them. But that doesn't express the nub of his attitude to the world and to human behaviour. What I admire is his belief in the moral responsibility of society towards its members, an attitude he brought to bear on his economic theories. His 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, rightly predicted that the revenge-crazed impulse among the victors to extract punitive reparations from Germany would have disastrous consequences. He believed the untempered operation of the free markets needed to be moderated by intervention. He went out of fashion when the monetarists held sway, so it was good to see Keynesianism back as the only way to get us out of the credit crisis of 2007/08. Now, as we hover on the brink of the coalition's precipitous cuts, there's no better time to consider his wisdom.

But it is the rounded man I admire most: a member of the Bloomsbury set, he managed to outrage them all – including former lovers (male) – by marrying Lydia Lopokova, a star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He loved the arts and did loads to help them, creating the Arts Council of Great Britain, and seeing to the financial wellbeing of Sadler's Wells, the Royal Opera House and King's College, Cambridge. He made money as a speculator and used it to buy paintings – Cézanne, Braque, Picasso. All this and he managed to be nice, too – witty and always warm hearted. His arch enemy Hayek called him "the only really great man I ever knew." We need more like him.

THE GUARDIAN