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9781781256503

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Cleverer and funnier than any one person has a right to be. -- John Carey Sunday Times Our most subversive playwright... and 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. -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday Fire lit. Hot, thick toast. Coffee. Reading the inimitable Mr Bennett. Happiness. -- Nigel Slater Confirms his reputation as one of the sharpest and funniest writers in the English language. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Spectator Our greatest living writer. -- Roger Lewis The Times Screamingly funny. -- Observer Miranda Sawyer An endlessly rewarding read by a man for all seasons and one who occupies a unique place in our culture and affections -- Liz Thomson The Arts Desk 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 -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday Few diarists could offer such a consistently funny and touching authorial voice as Bennett. Long may he keep on keeping on. -- Ben Lawrence Daily Telegraph 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. -- David Sexton Evening Standard There is not a dull or uninteresting page here ... teddy bear he may be but he has a tiger's teeth The Herald This latest anthology of diaries and essays is a beautiful, humane and honest collection of reflections -- Rachel Reeves Every piece here conveys the sense of an idiosyncratic and cussed mind, alive and open to the world -- Joe Moran Guardian The literary equivalent of a warm cup of Horlicks spiked lavishly with whisky Metro, Books of the Year 2016 [A] lavish miscellany ... appreciative, nostalgic and also hugely funny. Prospect 'Alan Bennett, with his combination of pitiless observation and gentle understatement, is perhaps the best-loved of English writers alive today Sunday Telegraph Intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny -- John Carey Sunday Times 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. -- Ian Samson TLS

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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 stage including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George), and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. At the National Theatre, London, The History Boys won numerous awards including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for Best New Play and the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critcs' Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics' Award, a New York Drama League Award and six Tony's. The Habit of Art opened at the National in 2009. His collection of prose, Untold Stories, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography, 2006. The Uncommon Reader was published in 2007 and Smut in 2011. The film of The Lady in the Van, starring Maggie Smith, was released in 2015 with the tie-in edition spending several weeks on bestseller lists.

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