Alan Bennett’s first play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968; his most recent, Allelujah! in 2018. The Choral, for which he wrote the screenplay, was released in 2025. Bennett’s diary for 1983 appeared in the LRB, and we carried his diary every year after that until 2023. He now claims his life is so dull he won’t inflict it on LRB readers. The Lady in the Van was first published in the paper, and the LRB has also carried some of his Talking Heads monologues; short stories, such as ‘The Uncommon Reader’; pieces of memoir; and reviews, including ‘The Wrong Blond’, on W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and ‘Alas! Deceived’, on Philip Larkin.
Seated obscurely towards the back of the church and on a side aisle, Treacher was conscious nevertheless of being much looked at. Tall, thin and with a disagreeable expression, were this a film written forty years ago he would have been played by the actor Raymond Huntley who, not unvinegary in life, in art made a speciality of ill-tempered businessmen and officious civil servants. Treacher...
5 January. A lorry delivers some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by...
Insofar as my mother ever voices any ambitions for my brother and me, it is that we should become gentlemen farmers earning £10 a week. This would have been in the early 1940s when £500 a year is a not unrespectable income, though why she has settled on farming, gentlemanly or otherwise, for which neither of us has any inclination – is not plain. Getting away from Leeds has...
At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the area steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’‘
Alan Bennett reads from his 2018 diary, in which he puts on a new play and finds himself on someone’s arm.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2017 diary, in which he finds his métier at last.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2016 diary, in which he wonders what ’memes‘ are and goes to Venice.
Alan Bennett reads from his diary for 2015, in which he shouts at the top of his voice and works the red carpet with Alex Jennings.
Alan Bennett explains his objections to private education.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2014 diary, in which he looks after a dog and his memoir, The Lady in the Van, is made into a film.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2013 diary, in which he refuses to pay his bills and celebrates the National Theatre’s 50th birthday.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2012 diary, in which he appears on Family Guy and starts rehearsals for a new play.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2011 diary, in which he considers the banana skin and is mistaken for ‘another Alan’.
Alan Bennett introduces his latest play, The Habit of Art, and responds to questions from the audience about the play, and about his life and work to date.
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