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Time to Be in Earnest
- A Fragment of Autobiography
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's Summary
P. D. James' extraordinary memoir of her early life and time starting out as a novelist as well as diaries recording her in old age.
In this intriguing and very personal book, part diary, part memoir, P. D. James considers the twelve months of her life between her seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth birthdays and looks back on her earlier life.
With all her familiar skills as a writer, she recalls what it was like to be a schoolgirl in the 1920s and 1930s in Cambridge and then giving birth to her second daughter during the worst of the Doodlebug bombardment in London during the war. It follows her work, starting out as an administrator in the National Health Service, then on to the Home Office in the forensic and criminal justice departments. She later served as a governor of the BBC, was an influential member of the British Council, served on the Arts Council and tin he Society of Authors, and eventually entered the House of Lords.
Along the way this diary and personal memoir deals with her burgeoning reputation as a novelist, starting with Cover Her Face in 1962, and with the craft of the classical detective story. She also details the writing of one of her most intriguing and carefully researched books, A Certain Justice.
This wonderful memoir will enthral aficionados of detective fiction, and will also appeal to anyone who lived through those turbulent years of the twentieth century.
Critic Reviews
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What listeners say about Time to Be in Earnest
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Story

- Kirstine
- 01-23-20
Will appeal to those who enjoy the author's books
I've read/listened to all the author's books several times and always enjoy her fine writing and gripping stories, so was interested to learn more about the woman who could conjure up so many different intricately woven plots. As she says at the beginning of the present book this is not a conventional autobiography nor the recounting of sequential diary entries, but a snapshot of what she was doing on some of the days during one year in the late 1970s mixed with memories from her long life. I thought this a successful way to get a picture of her as a person and an insight into her often strong opinions. If her commitments during that one year are anything to go by, she must have had a strong constitution to have undertaken so many speaking and book-signing events coupled with all the hassle of traveling to the venues, some as far-fling as Japan and found time to research and write her books. I'm left with a greater admiration for this overly modest. but remarkable woman who had a far from easy early life, bore the sadness of her husband's chronic illness and early death, but who blossomed in later life. A book that I believe will be enjoyed by admirers of her novels.
The narrator is an excellent choice as I felt that PD James was speaking to me.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story

- suecad
- 08-24-18
Wonderful!
Completely absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable. What an incredibly busy and interesting life PD James led. I found Patience Tomlinson’s narration perfect. So often with audio books the narrator can take away the pleasure of the written word, this time it enhanced it and I could almost see PD James speaking the words. I shall listen to this once more in the future and am sure enjoy it all over again!
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Performance
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Story
The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the 20th century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice.
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Terrific listening experience
- By M. Mead on 09-17-21
By: Colm Toibin
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Red Comet
- The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
- By: Heather Clark
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 45 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world.
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Amazing!
- By BlueDevil on 10-28-20
By: Heather Clark
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Dorothy Day
- Dissenting Voice of the American Century
- By: John Loughery, Blythe Randolph
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 17 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After growing up in a conservative middle-class Republican household and working several years as a left-wing journalist, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for the next 50 years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. A believer in civil disobedience, Day went to jail several times protesting the nuclear arms race. She was critical of capitalism and US foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism.
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Well Documented
- By dragonfly on 03-19-22
By: John Loughery, and others
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Capote
- A Biography
- By: Gerald Clarke
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 25 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
First published in 1988 - just four years after Capote's death - Clarke paints a vivid behind-the-scenes picture of the author's life, based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the man himself and the people close to him. From the glittering heights of notoriety and parties with the rich and famous to his later struggles with addiction, Capote emerges as a richly multidimensional person - both brilliant and flawed.
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the brightest stars can self destruct
- By Jared_S on 09-22-21
By: Gerald Clarke
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Oscar Wilde
- A Life
- By: Matthew Sturgis
- Narrated by: John Pirkis
- Length: 34 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The fullest, most textural, most accurate - most human - account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life - based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life.
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I didn’t know.…
- By James Messelbeck on 01-20-22
By: Matthew Sturgis
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A Life of My Own
- A Memoir
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Penelope Wilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Marked by honesty, humility, and grace, rendered in the most elegant of prose, A Life of My Own is a portrait of a life, replete with joy and heartbreak. With quiet insight and unsparing clarity, Claire Tomalin writes autobiography at its most luminous, delivering an astonishing and emotionally taut masterpiece.
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Flat, name dropping with no insight
- By Mary on 01-01-19
By: Claire Tomalin
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These Fevered Days
- Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
- By: Martha Ackmann
- Narrated by: Martha Ackmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready" - and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home" (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was ambivalent toward publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through 10 decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet.
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Captivating But Too Much Information
- By Sara B. on 08-05-20
By: Martha Ackmann
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Edith Wharton
- By: Hermione Lee
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With profound empathy and insight, Hermione Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
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Gardens Over Great Novels
- By Aaron Elliott on 04-26-07
By: Hermione Lee
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Tom Stoppard
- A Life
- By: Hermione Lee
- Narrated by: Stephen Crossley
- Length: 37 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love - remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences.
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great biography
- By Aidan O'Reilly on 03-11-21
By: Hermione Lee
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C.S. Lewis
- A Biography of Friendship
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An Oxford student of C.S. Lewis' said he found his new tutor interesting and was told by J.R.R. Tolkien, "Interesting? Yes, he's certainly that. You'll never get to the bottom of him." You can learn a great deal about people by their friends and nowhere is this more true than in the case of C.S. Lewis, the remarkable academic, author, popularizer of faith - and creator of Narnia. He lost his mother early in life and became estranged from his father, much to his regret.
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It's a Great Concept
- By James on 08-13-20
By: Colin Duriez
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Charlotte Brontë
- A Fiery Heart
- By: Claire Harman
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Charlotte Brontë's life contained all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Like Jane Eyre, she was raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors and sent away to a brutally strict boarding school at a young age. Charlotte grew up and watched helplessly as, one by one, her five beloved siblings sickened and died; by the end of her short life, she was the only child of the Brontë clan remaining.
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Clear-Eyed Bio of Literature's Most Elusive Figure
- By wally on 09-02-16
By: Claire Harman
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The Long Loneliness
- The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
- By: Dorothy Day
- Narrated by: Nancy Linari
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality...founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than 50 years in numerous battles of social justice.” Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young journalist in the crucible of Greenwich Village political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous conversion to Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage.