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. 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. xv; 658pp including index; illustrated by monochrome photographs, one in colour, with some printed copies of pictures incorporated in the text pages. And of course it was only that, by one of the casual cruelties routine inflicts, she had on admission been bathed, her hair washed then left uncombed and uncurled so that it now stood out round her head in a mad halo, this straightaway drafting her into the ranks of the demented. If you have concerns about how we have used your personal information, you also have the right to complain to a privacy regulator.

Alan Bennett - Literature - British Council Alan Bennett - Literature - British Council

I said, exasperated, but she put her hand to my mouth, pointed at the living-room door then wrote ‘TALKING’ in wavering letters on a pad, mutely shaking her head.I went over to tell her the taxi hadn’t come, only to find she was now telling her tale to an empty pillow. I’ve been passing the place for years without looking because I didn’t know it was a place; that anything had happened there to make it a place, let alone a place that had something to do with me. These new additions to the acclaimed and much-loved series will be published together as Two Besides, first as an ebook on 8 July and then in a beautiful hardback edition on 15 October. The History Boys opened to great acclaim at the National in 2004, and is winner of the Evening Standard Award, the South Bank Award and the Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett | Goodreads Untold Stories by Alan Bennett | Goodreads

His two series of monologues for television, Talking Heads I (1988) and Talking Heads 2 (1998), proved Bennett to be the master of television monologue, a genre he had first anticipated in A Woman Of No Importance (1982) - his first play starring a single actress. My brother, who had come up from Bristol to help with the move, also thought the state of the house was to blame, fastening particularly on an item that seemed to be top of Mam’s list of complaints, the absence of stair-carpet. A thousand shall fall beside thee,’ we sang, ‘and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. His account of his own illness is strikingly restrained and all the more powerful for that, utterly eschewing sentimentality.I once nearly dragged her out of the house to confront an elderly hiker who was sitting on the wall opposite, eating his sandwiches. There was Mam, working upstairs at Stylo Shoes in Briggate in 1926, watching mounted police charge the strikers.

Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999 Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999

Having made no money and the job having given him precious little satisfaction, he was never so happy as when in 1966 he was able to abandon butchering for good. Sometime in the course of this terrible hour a neat middle-aged woman stopped at the foot of Mam’s bed.It was well-received, and transferred to the Duchess Theatre in the West End of London, being subsequently adapted for radio broadcast by BBC Radio 4.