Stop the Clocks

  • Author Joan Bakewell
  • Narrator Helen Bourne
  • Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
  • Run Time 10 hours and 38 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Memoirs.
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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

  • [Joan Bakewell’s] new book is a joy

    Psychologies

  • A wry analysis of the world she will leave

    Observer

  • Heartfelt and fiendishly smart

    Sunday Telegraph

  • Companionable and insightful . . . by turns entertaining, frank and – when dealing with death and loss – unflinching. It is, then, true to the spirit of a most accomplished woman, who has always had the knack of making whatever she does look easy. When it comes to facing down old age with such style and honesty, that is perhaps the most impressive achievement of all

    Herald

  • She writes as sensitively as George Orwell . . . Bakewell is an advertisement for active survival . . . long live life, say I, if it produces books as brave as these

    New Statesman

  • What makes Bakewell so thoroughly engaging is her ongoing thirst for knowledge . . . Bakewell has added an elegant and elegiac pause to the many things already left behind

    Tribune

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