Untold Stories, Alan Bennett's first major collection of prose since his bestselling Writing Home, brings together the finest and funniest of his writing over the last ten years. After Untold Stories: Part 1: Stories, Part 2: The Diaries and Part 3: Written on the Body (all available from BBC Audiobooks), Part 4: A Common Assault contains two more reminiscences from Bennett's life and an essay on the class system.
A Common Assault describes an incident in Italy when he was mugged, and found himself trying to give a statement to the police in bad Italian. The History Boys harks back once more to Bennett's time at school, and shows how the raw material of experience was eventually transformed into the highly-acclaimed stage play The History Boys. Arise, Sir..., finishes on a light-hearted note, in which Bennett muses on the Honours List in typically iconoclastic mode.
Alan Bennett's 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, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George) and an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. The History Boys won the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, the South Bank Award and six Tony Awards.
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"I feel a great affection for Alan Bennett, at least the one he offers up in these periodic collections of ephemera. He seems the kind of mildly eccentric, vaguely comic figure you might find lurking around the periphery in a novel by Trollope. (Though I wouldn't find him there myself - I can't bear Trollope, his obsession with the minutiae of life in small cathedral towns drives me mad.) He spends much of his time puttering around London on his faithful bicycle; making daily observations in his diary, the tone of which suggest someone who is slightly disengaged, and not at all unhappily, from the mess and struggle ("living," he says elsewhere, not without some pride, "is something I have managed largely to avoid"); and indulging what are apparently his two favorite pastimes when not writing - visiting historic religious sites, the older and more decrepit the better, and consuming sandwiches al fresco in hedgerows, fields and deserted churchyards with his partner Rupert. He's like something out of Wind in the Willows. It's hard to imagine just how he got through the years with Beyond the Fringe and the three other outsized and exceedingly messy personalities involved in that, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and house genius Jonathan Miller; they didn't remain especially close after, I don't think, although Miller apparently lives nearby and occasionally stops when he's passing to chat over the front gate, a wonderful image in itself. ("He asks me what I'm reading. It's actually re-rereading, and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne's Through Wood and Dale. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me The Origins of the Final Solution. I say to him we would each of us derive more benefit if I were reading his book and he mine...") But when you watch the film of FRINGE, you realize how much of the writing was Bennett's and how cleverly he found a performing niche for himself amid the baroque flourishes of the others, somewhere between a dotty old professor and a psychotic schoolboy. There are very few genuine English eccentrics remaining, not in this true, slightly 19th century sense, and I suspect England is the poorer for it."
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Margaret (4 out of 5 stars)