Customer Reviews
Not as good as I had hoped - By: L. Macleod, 04 Mar 2008 
I found this biography very long winded - too much detail in fact in the end I was bored of it & found myself flipping through the book to find the interesting bits. I loved Cider with Rosie & When I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - however to learn more of Laurie Lee was to diminish the aura of what he had produced in his writings. He was in fact a very imperfect human being & the biography gives every smalll detail of this man's life & his connections & relationships. I suppose I would have liked the biography to be more poetic in some sense but perhaps Grove gives us the facts rather than the 'idea' of the man.
A remarkable insight to an essentially private man - By: , 10 Nov 2000 
We alll thought we knew what there was to know about the late & great Laurie Lee. Not so. Valerie Grove has unearthed a minefield of hidden agendas, thought processes & diversions of the greatest descriptive writer of his age. "Cider With Rosie" " As I Walked out..." " A moment of war" & others are mere blips in a life filled with lives, loves, hates & downright excesses. These excesses Grove explains with conviction & reason, moreover she has delved to look beyond just mere surface. There is no doubting Lee's masterful verses with the pen, what has now come to light is the many influences & sheer timing. It stems from a time no so very long ago, but seemingly a golden time before the very burst of modernism & the hateful traits that prevent such writing, such artistry, such poetic patronage. Valerie Grove has captured the character, the very things that made Lee & in some ways destroyed his will to continue writing beyond those pre & post war years. Although alll his published masters were written from 1947 onwards,with breaks between each of the volumes, the reader of Grove's biography finallly is told & can understand the reasons why. The theft of Lee's diaries in 1969 was not only a disaster, but the last remains of the true 'Spanish' picture, now subject to immense debate by scholars & historians. It is to Lee that we must thank for remembering almost the full picture from memory without the aid of the diaries, & thus bringing forth the many failures of democracy, let alone communism! Valerie Grove's book is a masterpiece in itself & can proudly sit beside Lee's work on the bookshelf.
A work of fine detail and even finer sensitivity. - By: , 16 Apr 2000 Whilst he was the author of one of the best-loved books in the modern era, Laurie Lee was an elusive character, almost proud of the fact that he alllowed no-one to be so close that they knew everything about him. This biography simply could not have been written whilst he lived. By winning the trust & co-operation of so many who knew Lee, Valerie Grove has pieced together the definitive work on him. Many would have been tempted to judge him - dreamer, liar, philanderer - but Valerie Grove demonstrates a true understanding of Laurie Lee; he was a hopeless romantic in alll he said, wrote & did. Of course, he only chose to write about some event several decades after it took place & whether it was the poverty of his childhood or the battle at Teruel, what he wrote was inevitably distorted by time & his romantic view. Valerie Grove's achievement here is not to hold Lee up to the bright light of examination but to illuminate things for the reader the way he saw them. For me, this shows not just understanding but a fine sensitivity for what made him what he was; an incurable romantic. Unlike so many biographies, this book is itself beautifully written. The passage describing his death in the village where he had, by now so famously, been born & grown up is extremely moving. Only later can you realise just how Valerie Grove has made you love this incorrigible rogue & sometime vagabond. Millions worldwide have read & enjoyed 'Cider with Rosie'. If you are one of them & if you have ever wondered what became of little Lol, you should read 'Laurie Lee - the well-loved stranger' by Valerie Grove.
