Michael Palin " My Great Uncle Harry"

Presented by: Keats Community Library

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0	LONDON: Keats Community Library
P	Thursday 25th January, 2024
N	7:00pm

Event information

Michael Palin returns to talk about his new book, "My Great Uncle Harry".

Extract from the Guardian: Over the years, Michael Palin has developed a talent for mining his past. The first three published volumes of his diaries (a fourth is on the way next year) perfectly encapsulate the ebb and flow of a restless creative spirit. Released in 1991, the film American Friends, meanwhile, dealt with a chaste Oxford professor who found himself in a complicated holiday romance with an older American woman and her teenage daughter. The story was pulled straight from the diary of Palin’s great-grandfather, Edward.

And so it continues with Great-Uncle Harry, a biography of Edward’s youngest son. However, where American Friends presented a subject matter that could be mined for laughs, Great-Uncle Harry offers nothing of the sort. Harry Palin was a little known and, from all available evidence, misunderstood man. His brief and somewhat directionless life ended in 1916, at the age of 32, at the battle of the Somme. His body was never recovered. Palin assumes that Harry either “died from a single bullet wound and was buried where he fell” or “was obliterated”.

Great-Uncle Harry represents Palin’s attempt to get to know this apparently unknowable man. Short on words and ill at ease in family photographs, Harry was the youngest of a huge and distinguished brood, and spent the first years of adulthood bumbling around the world in search of work. Handed a job on an Indian tea plantation, he was moved on after managers bemoaned his lack of effort and intelligence. Eventually he found employment in New Zealand, as a farmhand.

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