Untold Stories

Product Information

The drowning, though, straightaway shed light on an incident early on in my mother’s depression which at the time I’d thought almost a joke. Dad had gone out and we were alone in the house. Motioning me into the passage where we would not be over-heard, she again whispered that she had done something terrible. I was having none of it, but she got hold of my arm, pulled me up the stairs and pointed to the bathroom, though she would not go in. There were six inches of water in the bath. Alan Bennett has won many prestigious awards for his writing. His prose collection Writing Home (1994), was followed by a sequel, Untold Stories, in 2005. His play, The History Boys (2004), won the 2004 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and The Uncommon Reader (2007) is a novella in which the Queen develops a taste for reading.

Untold stories : Bennett, Alan, 1934- : Free Download, Borrow Untold stories : Bennett, Alan, 1934- : Free Download, Borrow

Not that the ceremony she was dreading was likely to be an elaborate one as neither family can have had any money. A proper wedding, though, would have run to bridesmaids and they were there to hand in her two sisters, Kathleen and Lemira, and this may well have been part of the trouble, as she had always felt overshadowed by them and something of a Cinderella. Unlike her, they revelled in any kind of public show, edging into whatever limelight was going. Later in life, they made far more of my brother’s and my achievements than Mam and Dad did. So when I got my degree Dad wrote, ‘We haven’t let on to your aunties yet that you’re getting your cap and gown. You won’t be wanting a lot of splother’–‘splother’ Dad’s word for the preening and fuss invariably attendant on the presence of the aunties.

Sign Up to the Newsletter

Bennett is an agnostic. [20] He was raised Anglican and gradually "left it [the Church] over the years". [21]

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, Signed - AbeBooks Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, Signed - AbeBooks

And in the kissing and the naming my parents were revealed stripped of all defence. Though they were the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple, I had never seen my father do anything so intimate as to kiss my mother’s hand and seldom since childhood heard them call each other by name. ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’ was what my brother and I called them and what they called each other, their proper names kept for best. Or worst. There is much that clearly distresses Bennett about modern Britain, particularly the way that it educates its young, and the encroachment of the market on services such as libraries and galleries. But he disassociates himself firmly from Larkin's fastidious despair. His is a generous sadness; he wants what was good about the past to be available still, and fears that it is not. While he makes it clear that he sees the child of today as, in significant ways, disadvantaged, he also sees that the children themselves are as good as ever. And that is exactly what she did to the country. I remember as a child chanting "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher" when, as Education Secretary, she ended the free milk program for elementary school children. As PM she continued her assaults on the underprivileged while boosting the coffers of the Hooray Henrys. Giving the manuscripts to Bodley - it sounds rather pious - is a kind of small recompense for what I was given. And not merely by Oxford, I also feel I was given it by the state, and the state isn't something that people would normally thank or think well of - and hence the phrase 'the nanny state'." ( The Guardian, 24 October 2008.)

Select a format:

His many works for television include his first play for the medium, A Day Out in 1972, A Little Outing in 1977, Intensive Care in 1982, An Englishman Abroad in 1983, and A Question of Attribution in 1991. [6] But perhaps his most famous screen work is the 1988 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were later performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. A second set of six Talking Heads followed a decade later. The Broadway Advocacy Coalition / David Byrne's American Utopia / Freestyle Love Supreme / Graciela Daniele (2021) Jury, Louise. "Historic night for Alan Bennett as his new play dominates the Olivier awards", The Independent, 21 February 2005 Lancaster Moor Hospital is not a welcoming institution. It was built at the beginning of the 19th century as the County Asylum and Workhouse, and seen from the M6 it has always looked to me like a gaunt grey penitentiary. It was a relief to find the psychiatric wing Mam was to be admitted to not part of the main complex but a villa, Ridge Lee, set in its own grounds, and as we left Mam with a nurse in the entrance hall it seemed almost cheerful. Dad was not uncheerful either, relieved that now at any rate something was going to be done and that she was ‘in professional hands’. Even Mam seemed resigned to it, and though she had never been in hospital in her life, she let us kiss her goodbye and leave without protest. How long depressions lasted no doctor was prepared to say, nor anyone else that I talked to. There seemed to be no timetable, this want of a timetable almost a definition of the disease. It might be months, but one of the books I looked into talked about years, though what all the authorities did seem agreed on was that, treated or not, depression cleared up in time. One school of thought held that the depression should be allowed to run its course unalleviated and unaccelerated by drugs. But on my mother drugs seemed to have no effect anyway, and if the depression were to run its course and it did take years, many months even, what would happen to my father?

The Guardian The non-joiner | Books | The Guardian

Birthday boy" – Blake Morrison salutes Alan Bennett as the writer approaches his 75th birthday The Guardian, 7 May 2009He manages to get naked again, streaking across Parliament Square, generally displaying such a facility for stripping off that it’s hard not to feel that’s where his future lies. He turns out to be from Coventry, which is of course a place with some tradition of public nudity”. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, then after a period of National Service, became a lecturer for a short time at Oxford University. He co-wrote and starred in Beyond the Fringe (1963), a satirical review, along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. Later the show travelled to the West End and to New York. After this, he started writing for the stage and, later, for television. To date he has been actor, director and broadcaster, and written for stage, television, radio and film. His work focuses on the everyday and the mundane; on people with typically British characteristics and obsessions.