The Last Landlady (Hardback)

Laura Thompson (Author)

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The Last Landlady

The Last Landlady

£16.99 £7.00

The Last Landlady

£16.99 £7.00

Spectator book of the year: "An eclectic mix of social history and elegy, ironic comedy and indelible Englishness. It is about the pub as theatre."

Laura Thompson’s grandmother Violet was one of the great landladies. Born in a London pub, she became the first woman to be given a publican’s licence in her own name and, just as pubs defined her life, she seemed in many ways to embody their essence.

Laura spent part of her childhood in Violet’s Home Counties establishment, mesmerised by her gift for cultivating the mix of cosiness and glamour that defined the pub’s atmosphere, making it a unique reflection of the national character. Her memories of this time are just as intoxicating: beer and ash on the carpets in the morning, the deepening rhythms of mirth at night, the magical brightness of glass behind the bar…

Through them Laura traces the story of the English pub, asking why it has occupied such a treasured position in our culture. But even Violet, as she grew older, recognised that places like hers were a dying breed, and Laura also considers the precarious future they face. Part memoir, part social history, part elegy, 
The Last Landlady pays tribute to an extraordinary woman and the world she epitomised.
  • Publisher: Unbound
  • ISBN: 9781783525027
  • Pages: 304
  • Weight: 0.454
Laura Thompson won the Somerset Maugham award with her first book, The Dogs, and wrote two books about horse racing while living in Newmarket. Her biographical study of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate, appeared in 2003 (re-issued 2015) and was followed by a major biography of Agatha Christie. A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan was published in 2014, and 2015's Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters was recently sold to television. She lives in Richmond.

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