But Priestly expertly wrong-foots us by breaking the scene in-between and taking nineteen years forward in time in the second act. Priestley manages to capture the moral complexity of our everyday lives and just goes to show how our behaviour could affect others. The theme of social responsibility bypasses time periods and generations and is one which is never as important as it is today.

Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley's 'time' plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. he began writing novels, and with his third and fourth novels, The Good Companions and Angel Pavement, he scored a great success and established an international reputation. In 1922, after refusing several academic posts, and having already published one book and contributed critical articles and essays to various reviews, he went to London. The other powerful plays in this collection – ‘Time and the Conways’, ‘I Have Been Here Before’ and ‘The Linden Tree’ – explore time, fate, free will and the effects of war.The first pattern is that of man reproducing himself, finding food and shelter, tilling the land, building cities, crossing the seas. Priestly's cyclical use of time honestly made me a lot less hopeful for these same issues that we are dealing with today, which is why I'm glad I finished with I Have Been Here Before: the characters tear themselves out of their fated timelines and we don't know what comes next, except that it'll be different from before.

He joined the army in 1914, and in 1919, on receiving an ox-officers' grant, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. For the simple reason that the first three have metaphysical, supernatural, moral, social and paradoxical elements.Time and the Conways' has a structural layout that really amplifies its poignancy in a manner that is remarkable. D. Ouspensky, is that humans live a succession of lives, which are likely to be similar but not necessarily identical; that ordinarily we remain unconscious of these lives, though one can sometimes access memories of them; and that, regardless of those memories, the course of one’s life is subject to “feelings, imagination, and will”—in short, that you can change the course you’re on, or even the course someone else is on.

It has a powerful political message which we will all learn in “fire, blood and anguish” if we don’t listen. In Indian mythology, time is cyclic, with past, present and future recurring ad infinitum whereas in the Occident "time's arrow" - its apparently unidimensional movement in the forward direction - is an absolute concept with an "end of days" fast approaching. The Linden Tree', a Chekhov-like study of family relationships, finds the Lindens divided : Professor Linden at sixty-five could retire but is dedicated to teaching at a run-down provincial university.Like Time and the Conways, this one begins on a birthday; Professor Linden, nominally the head of this two-generation family, teaches history; he’s turning 65 and is being pressed to retire; time (the birthday) has brought the family together from other cities in two countries, but time (its passage over years) has spread them apart; how the characters see things depends in part on their age; Elgar’s cello concerto is discussed twice, for its evocation of times past; etc. The Linden Tree" also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war. His prolific output continued right up to his final years, and to the end he remained the great literary all-rounder. I look forward to reading it again, especially the second act, to really dig my teeth into what's going on.