Untold Stories

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It was actually only to be goodbye for a few hours, as visiting times were from seven to eight, and though it was a fifty-mile round trip from home, Dad insisted that we should return that same evening, his conscientiousness in this first instance setting the pattern for the hundreds of hospital visits he was to make over the next eight years, with never a single one missed, and with him getting agitated if he was likely to be even five minutes late. Bennett’s phenomenally successful play The History Boys (2004), about a group of boys from a northern grammar school attempting the Oxford entrance exam during the 1980s, combines criticism of revisionist historians and neo-Gradgrindian educational practices with the statement of a fundamental – if unfashionable – belief in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Here, as in Forty Years On, 35 years earlier, school can be read as a metaphor for nation: differences between the cultural references in the two plays chart further shifts in British cultural and social life. The book's preterite flavour is enhanced by its subject matter. Part of it is family history, but much of what remains is the history of particular ways of being English. Being a grammar-school boy at a time when this really meant something; being gay when this was a very long way from being acceptable or even comprehensible; coming from somewhere in particular. Bennett started as a historian and he still writes like one; precisely aware of how people's ways of thought, opportunities and self-expression are shaped by what is going on around them in a wide as well as an immediate sense. 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

Leonard Bernstein / Carol Burnett / Rex Harrison / The National Theatre Company of Great Britain / The Negro Ensemble Company (1969)We had left Mam at a hospital that morning looking, even after weeks of illness, not much different from her usual self: weeping and distraught, it's true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here.

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Bennett is portrayed by British actor Alex Jennings in the 2015 comedy-drama film The Lady in the Van. He appears as himself briefly at the end of the film. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched high above her knees, banging her spoon on a tray. But as I turned to go I saw that Dad was walking on down the ward. Nightingale, Benedict (9 February 2009). "Nicholas Hytner on his time at the National Theatre". Times Online. Archived from the original on 16 June 2011. Archived version is available without subscription. What was agitating her, and maybe it agitated my father too, as he was in many ways more shy even than her, was the ceremony itself and the churchful of people it must inevitably involve. Marriage is a kind of going public and I can see, as Dad can’t or won’t, that coming to live in the village, which has maybe brought on this second bout forty years later, is a kind of going public too.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. And there’s no shame in taking your time with it, because it’s that kind of read. You could even dip in and out of it if you wanted to, although I’d advise against it. The problem with doing that is that you’d never know when you finished, and there’d also be a risk that you’d find yourself re-reading something that you’d already read. Yet there were others who seemed entirely at ease in these surroundings, elderly sons of vacant mothers, jovial husbands of demented wives, and some whose faces were more coarse and void than those of the patients they were visiting. They sat round the bed in bovine indifference, chatting across the lost creature in their midst as if the lunacy of a loved one was no more than was to be expected. Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author’s consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

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Bennett is an agnostic. [20] He was raised Anglican and gradually "left it [the Church] over the years". [21] I mean don’t get me wrong, it was still a decent enough read, it’s just a bit of a trek and it will take a ton of commitment. That’s particularly true when you get to the diaries, because even though they do tie in with major events and take you behind the scenes on some of his creative projects, you’re still just sitting there reading diary entries. It’s not quite as dull as reading a collection of letters, but it’s not far off either. Bennett was born on 9 May 1934 in Armley, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. [1] The younger son of a Co-op butcher, Walter, and his wife, Lilian Mary (née Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford), and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School). He has an older brother, Gordon, who is three years his senior. [2] Alan Bennett: "You have to be careful about becoming an old git" ". Radio Times. 24 December 2016 . Retrieved 28 November 2019.This book won't do anything to tarnish Alan Bennett's reputation as one of Britain's best writers, but it is only this reputation that allows him and his publisher to get away with such a lazy offering. And you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you passed this one up, at least if you’re an Alan Bennett fan. That’s because there’s actually a lot of good stuff here, including some pretty interesting mini essays that take you behind the scenes of some of Bennett’s theatre productions or that go into the inspirations for various different stories that he’s worked on throughout the years. I went to the funeral at St Michael’s, Headingley, the church where in our teens we had both been enthusiastic worshippers. Every Friday night a group of us would gather in the chancel to say the office of Compline with at the heart of it Psalm 91: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day. A thousand shall fall beside thee,’ we sang, ‘and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.’ Now it has, I thought, and as the remnants of our group stood awkwardly outside the church, reflected that he was the first person of our generation to have died. Oddly it was my mother who was most upset, far more so than her acquaintance with him warranted, the fact that he had not died a natural death but had committed suicide seeming particularly to grieve her in a way I might have thought strange had not her own shadows by that time already begun to gather. Let's enjoy Alan Bennett's revival play for what it is – Daniel Tapper on Alan Bennett's Enjoy guardian.co.uk, 6 February 2009 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. Yet the change was so dramatic, the obliteration of her usual self so complete, that to restore her even to an appearance of normality now seemed a hopeless task. She was mad because she looked mad.

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Except affliction was normal too and this one seemingly more common than I’d thought. Arriving at the lighted villa in its own little park, we found we were far from alone, the carpark full, the nurse busy at Reception, and hanging about the entrance hall as in all institutions (hospitals, law courts, passport offices), characters who joked with the staff, were clued up on the routine and, whether visitors or patients, seemed utterly at home. It was one of these knowing individuals, a young man familiar rather than affable, who took us along to what the nurse said was Mam’s ward. The highlight was the opening extended essay; a vivid, affecting description of his family and early life. I also grew up as a member of the “respectable” working class, and I can instantly recognize the attitudes of his parents, especially his mother’s aversion to anything “common”. His mother and mine certainly had that in common. I tell him that I don’t think so and that what Mr Parr was after, presumably, was whether there had been anything similar in the family before. I start the car. Mr Parr doesn’t think it’s relevant either, but standing on his doorstep as we drive away he may well be thinking that this is an odd family that censors its own history and it’s that that’s relevant. A play could begin like this, I used to think – with a man on-stage, sporadically angry with a woman off-stage, his bursts of baffled invective gradually subsiding into an obstinate silence. Resistant to the offstage entreaties, he continues to ignore her until his persistent refusal to respond gradually tempts the woman into view.At some point when he was still a boy Dad took it into his head to learn the violin. Why he chose an instrument that in its initial stages is so unrewarding I don’t know; it’s one of the many questions I never got round to asking him. He got no help at home, where he could only practise in the freezing parlour, the Gimmer too mean even to let him have any light, so that he had to manage with what there was from the gas lamp in the street outside. Whether he was born with perfect pitch I don’t know, but in later life he would play along to the hymns on the wireless, telling you the notes of the tune he was accompanying as easily as if he was spelling a word. In happier circumstances he would have been a professional violinist but there was never any hope of that and a butcher he remained, working first for the Co-op then, in 1946, buying a shop of his own, which he had to sell ten years later because of ill-health, then buying a smaller one and the same thing happening. 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. The book is a house of many mansions, celebrating his enthusiasms and focusing sharply on what he deplores: he remains an Attlee boy, and can only see modern life (especially under the present "Labour" government) as a dégringolade. His account of his own illness is strikingly restrained and all the more powerful for that, utterly eschewing sentimentality. In fact, what emerges from the book, and is perhaps the key to why he is so cherished, is a man who refuses to be anything other than who he is. He describes how, when he failed to become an officer during National Service, he identified himself: "What I was not was a joiner. And so in due course not a CBE, not a knight." Elsewhere he tells us that he is "reluctant to be enrolled in the ranks of gay martyrdom, reluctant, if the truth be told, to be enrolled in any ranks whatsoever". Except, of course, that he has joined the ranks of the non-joiners. Beyond all his varied brilliance, the wisdom and the profundity of so much of his work, it is his insistence on refusing to be other than who or what he is, that has made the British people take him under its wing. He is his own man. He sees the hilarity, however, when the National Gallery makes him a trustee on the grounds that he represents the man in the street. If only. Mam!’ 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. Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy. “With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domest