J. B. Priestley

The SPR has a glowing review by Robert Charman of a new book by Anthony Peake entitled "Time and The Rose Garden: Encountering the Magical In the Life and Works of J. B. Priestley". The focus is on how Priestley's interest in unorthodox theories of time, including J. W. Dunne's "Serial Time", influenced his writing:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/time-a...hony-peake

Charman is especially enthusiastic about Peake's selection from thousands of unpublished letters describing precognitive and other psi experiences, sent to Priestley after he was interviewed on TV in 1963 about his forthcoming book, "Man and Time". Charman summarises a particularly striking precognitive dream about an air disaster in 1952. The letters published by Peake were taken from those donated to the SPR by Priestley's son. Apparently there are hundreds more at Bradford University, and Peake plans to write another book about them.

I remember reading An Inspector Calls at school and thinking how strange it was.  It wasn't the usual dull kind of literature we got to read in English lessons, it was actually fascinating and we had a good discussion on it afterwards.  Thanks for this post Chris.

I remember reading An Inspector Calls at school and thinking how strange it was.  It wasn't the usual dull kind of literature we got to read in English lessons, it was actually fascinating and we had a good discussion on it afterwards.  Thanks for this post Chris.

Yes, I think it's very good. There are a couple of versions available online:

Alastair Sim (1954):
https://archive.org/details/AnInspectorCalls1954

Bernard Hepton (1982):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vukp3EFVweQ

Charman is especially enthusiastic about Peake's selection from thousands of unpublished letters describing precognitive and other psi experiences, sent to Priestley after he was interviewed on TV in 1963 about his forthcoming book, "Man and Time". Charman summarises a particularly striking precognitive dream about an air disaster in 1952. The letters published by Peake were taken from those donated to the SPR by Priestley's son. Apparently there are hundreds more at Bradford University, and Peake plans to write another book about them.

There's some more information about these letters in this paper by Katy Price published in 2014, though her interest is in "the intersection between patient-focused history of psychiatry and the history of parapsychology in everyday life", rather than precognition:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...8614000867

Here's a video of a presentation by Chris A. Roe, entitled "J. B. Priestley's Man and Time Letters: A Reanalysis," from the SPR's Annual Conference in 2018: