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“... lying in the long grass I would be enraptured. A biker delivers a letter from the BBC: ‘Alan Bennett? Can I shake your hand? The trouble is I sold all your plays for a gram of speed about five years ago.’ 23 August, Espiessac. Sitting in the shade of the cherry tree outside the pigeonnier in a rough, warm wind that snatches at the paper as I ...”

“... great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but ...”

“... launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance ...”

“... trouble. Gaining the chair of anatomy at Andersons Institution, he quickly fell out with Professor Andrew Ure, best known for his later celebration of the joys of factory labour; soon he found himself accused of adultery with Ure’s visibly-pregnant wife: more mucking around with bodies, it seemed. Ure sued for divorce, and Pattison was involved in another ...”

“... readers’ experience purely cerebral. In one of many suggestive footnotes, Jackson describes Alan Bennett reading a library book in which a paragraph has been marked with a crooked line: ‘I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves.’ The line is a hair. The distinction between good and ...”

“... chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she ...”

“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

“... far more utterly than places and buildings. Majorism was like an interminable funeral rite. Alan Bennett isn’t alone in feeling that there’s something deeply uncouth about this mutation: general melancholia and regret might indeed be more seemly for the old state-nation. Yet, as the famous Carlton TV programme on the Monarchy earlier this year ...”

“... is not so much the case with male singers: I don’t think Caruso, Matt Munro, Perry Como or Tony Bennett have been written about as tragic lives (though Chet Baker, with the sweet girlie voice that none of the divas had, probably belongs on the women’s side). Even the neurotic Sinatra is mostly known for having fun. Singing for men can be technique and a ...”

“... wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication while on temporary release from psychiatric care. Lesley’s father had committed ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the life ...”

“... of books. This was Carolyn’s current reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of ...”

“... different times in his life hinted that he voted both Labour and Tory. This misses the point. Alan Bennett says he had little faith that Peter’s drink problem would be solved at Alcoholics Anonymous – Peter’s sense of the ridiculous would be bound to overcome him at the meetings. Similarly, he could never have joined, or with any consistency supported, a ...”

“... Garys you’re so keen on, why not make up two teams of them, plus subs? Let’s see now: Ablett, Bennett, Brookes ...’ These past few years, these years of rampant soccer cred, have been a slow torment for the antique soccer bore. In the old days we were friendless and perhaps despised but we enjoyed a steady faith in our own expertise, our ...”