Seasons of Our Lives Spring, the Path to Discovery ; Summer, to Love Or Let Go ; Autumn, the Changing Moods ; Winter, the Pleasure and the Parting

Product Description The journey from birth to death can be an emotional rollercoaster ride - pleasure and pain, love and hate, success and failure, friendship and loneliness, confidence and despair. In this personal collection embracing a galaxy of writers from Shakespeare to Milne, Dickens to Burns, Betjeman to Dylan Thomas, news anchorman Martyn Lewis has gathered together poetry and prose to amuse, comfort and inspire – a literary journey through the trials and triumphs that we all experience at different stages of our lives. In “Seasons Of Our Lives” you can enjoy Kingsley Amis and Roald Dahl being introduced to the facts of life, Simone de Beauvoir’s very first love, John Arlott falling in love with cricket, Graham Greene meeting a friend he hadn’t seen for thirty years, Hilaire Beloc savouring the strange things we eat, Queen Victoria’s delight at her “dearest Albert”, Judi Dench on her path to becoming an actress, Winston Churchill choosing his career, Pete Townsend of The Who’s lyrics for the pop song “Pictures of Lily”, John Mortimer’s early eyesight problems offering him “the safe blur of childhood, Seamus Heaney on a youthful fascination with railways, and Laurie Lee’s memories of his mother. Whatever you are going through in life, the chances are you will find that someone, somewhere in this entertaining and rewarding book has been there before, and captured just what you are feeling in the finest of words. About the Author Martyn Lewis is one of the UK’s best known TV anchormen. Across three decades, he presented every mainstream national TV news programme, including ITV’s News At Ten and the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, and special live programmes on major events, including the start of the first Gulf War and the death of the Princess of Wales. The history of Independent Television News describes him as “simply one of the best news story film-makers ITN ever employed.” He now presents videos and chairs business conferences and debates for leading organisations worldwide, and is heavily involved in the UK voluntary sector, chairing its main umbrella organization NCVO, Families of the Fallen, the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service and YouthNet’s www.thesite.org (which he founded). In 1993, he made the news himself with two controversial and widely-debated speeches arguing for a shift in the agenda of TV news programmes to achieve a fairer balance between the positive and the negative, and analyse success and achievement as well as failure – a theme to which he has recently returned with an argument for “solutions-driven journalism”. He was awarded a CBE in the Prime Minister’s 1997 New Year Honours List.