Keeping On Keeping On

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage, including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of King George Ill (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George) and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The History Boys won Evening Standard, Critics' Circle and Olivier awards, as well as the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics' Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Play, a New York Drama League Award and six Tonys including Best Play. The film of The History Boys was released in 2006. Alan Bennett's collection of prose, Untold Stories, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, 2006. His 2009 play, The Habit of Art, received glowing reviews and was broadcast live the following year by National Theatre Live. In 2012 People premiered at the National Theatre to widespread critical acclaim. The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, sending Bennett's memoir of the same name to the top of the bestseller list for nine weeks.

Cleverer and funnier than any one person has a right to be ... inexhaustibly fascinating; Bennett has an eager, enquiring mind and a sharp way with words that can break your ideas open.
Is able to make the world dance with a single word ... On every page there is a phrase to make you smile, poetry disguised as comedy.
Few diarists could offer such a consistently funny and touching authorial voice as Bennett. Long may he keep on keeping on.
Wry and eloquent ... screamingly funny... his sentences are always beautiful.
There is no other writer, certainly none from any other era or nation, quite like Alan Bennett, and having this much more of his work is an uncovenanted blessing.
It is not only Bennett's claws that are sharp. So are his eyes ... confirms his reputation as one of the sharpest and funniest writers in the English language.
There is not a dull or uninteresting page here ... teddy bear he may be but he has a tiger's teeth.
An endlessly rewarding read by a man for all seasons and one who occupies a unique place in our culture and affections.
A fascinating exercise in modern history ... a superb collection, written from the unique perspective of an octogenarian at the top of his stylistic game, with a keen eye towards the past we have lost and the future we may yet inhabit.
This latest anthology of diaries and essays is a beautiful, humane and honest collection of reflections.
Every piece here conveys the sense of an idiosyncratic and cussed mind, alive and open to the world
The literary equivalent of a warm cup of Horlicks spiked lavishly with whisky.
Fire lit. Hot, thick toast. Coffee. Reading the inimitable Mr Bennett. Happiness.
[A] lavish miscellany ... appreciative, nostalgic and also hugely funny.
PRAISE FOR ALAN BENNETT:'Alan Bennett, with his combination of pitiless observation and gentle understatement, is perhaps the best-loved of English writers alive today
Intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny
Not only my book of the year, it is my book of the decade
Alan Bennett's work, which stands as one of the major achievements across several genres in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, demands the very best of us: not our praise but our attention.